WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES…

Living in Southwest Florida comes with certain inherent problems, one of which is power outages. They can be caused by a number of different scenarios, storms, hurricanes and frequently just the electrically charged lightning strikes that are often around, despite a lack of a storm.

It is always prudent to have an alternative means of power during those situations, preferably a generator, whether it be for the whole house or partial. A generator will take a lot of the inconvenience out of the equation when an outage occurs, but you need to access your needs and correctly match the generator with those needs.

A good way to start is to decide what you are going to want to power when your electricity goes down. Unless you are doing a whole house backup generator, you can generally forget running your air conditioning system during an outage. You will need to go around your home and choose the essential items that need to be backed up, such as a refrigerator and other appliances, certain lights and maybe a TV, radio or computer so that you can stay in touch with the world. You lighting will be determined by wattage, (see chart here,) while your appliances will generally have a label with their power requirements. Unless it is a whole house unit, do not expect your generator to run everything

Once you decide what you are wanting to have running, you will then have to choose a generator that produces more power that will be drawn than the total of the appliances and lighting, etc. You will also have to take into consideration the initial power surge at start up. I would also suggest hiring an electrician to put in a sub panel off your main panel, so that the generator will run the equipment from that sub panel and not from the main panel. During an outage, the main power panel is shut down and the sub panel will then take over, with a cord run from that panel directly to your portable generator. Never hook your generator up directly to your home’s wiring!

Taking action in advance of an outage will save you in the long run and make life less stressful knowing that you have an alternative power source.