Kilowatts for a County That Learned What Dark Feels Like

Helene left more than sixty thousand homes in this county dark, and it was only the latest name on a list that already held Matthew, Irma, Dorian, Idalia and Debby. Savannah is an evacuation-zone county with a habit of close calls. But the quieter truth is that coastal Georgia loses power on ordinary afternoons too: a thunderstorm off the marsh, a squirrel in a substation, a pine limb across a feeder in the Effingham woods. In a Savannah July a dead air conditioner stops being an inconvenience by the second afternoon, for the very young, the very old and anyone whose medication lives in a refrigerator. A standby generator notices the outage before you do, starts itself, and carries the house until the grid comes back. Installing that, properly, is the whole business.

• Concrete. A pad that is level, anchored and rated for coastal wind, elevated to the rules for mechanical equipment on flood-zone lots.
• Gas fitting. A natural-gas line sized properly from the meter, which is the most common defect in generator work we see, or LP plumbing and tank coordination where there is no main.
• Electrical. The automatic transfer switch at your panel: it senses the outage, starts the unit, shifts the house over and shifts it back.
• Permitting. Electrical and gas permits in Chatham, Effingham or Bryan county, inspections scheduled and passed, the paperwork handed to you.
• Commissioning. A simulated outage before we leave, so you watch the house drop, the unit catch and the load carry, then the weekly self-exercise set on the controller.

Everything downstream, from cost to fuel draw to whether the air conditioning runs in August, follows from the size of the unit, and the size follows from a load calculation that measures what your house actually draws instead of guessing from its square footage. Essentials-only coverage starts near 10 kilowatts; true whole-home for a typical Savannah house is usually 18 to 26. Most installed systems land between $6,000 and $11,000, with larger whole-home setups running higher, and the sizing guide and the cost guide walk both questions through.

The week after a named storm, everyone wants a generator: units go on back-order across the region, every installer's calendar fills for months, and the permit offices are swamped. In a normal season the whole project runs two to six weeks, with one or two days of that on your property. Booking the site visit in the quiet stretch and getting the pad poured on a mild week means spending storm season already covered. The other half of that decision is the number, and what a standby install includes, priced by system size lays out the four coverage tiers, from essentials-only through the large whole-home setups.

A standby unit that sits untouched for two years has a habit of quitting three hours into the storm it was bought for. A yearly visit for oil, battery and a load test keeps the machine as ready as the day it was commissioned, and the maintenance page lists what that visit covers.

The Moon River is the tidal stretch south of town that Johnny Mercer made famous, and it felt right for a company whose job is keeping Savannah's lights on against the dark. That is the whole story. Everything else on this site is about kilowatts.

Savannah proper and the growth corridors around it: Pooler, Richmond Hill, Rincon, Wilmington Island and Georgetown, each with a page about what generator projects look like in that town, from gas at the street to well pumps to salt air.

Monday through Friday, 7:30am to 5:30pm, at (912) 454-6565. In a storm week the schedule flexes and calls are answered in the order they came in. The quote form takes a few basics about the house at any hour, so the callback arrives already useful.