A Generator Maintenance Schedule Built Around Savannah's Weather

Every standby unit runs itself for a few minutes once a week, unloaded, on a timer set at commissioning. It proves the engine will crank and catch and not much else, because nothing in the house is drawing from it while it runs. Your weekly job is to notice it. Know which day and hour it fires, listen for a rough or surging run, and glance at the controller afterward for a warning. A missed exercise is the earliest signal you will get that something is wrong, and it belongs to a repair visit for a standby that has stopped rather than on this calendar.

• Louvers clear. Leaves, pine straw, mulch that has crept up the enclosure, and any nest a wasp has started since last month.
• Controller screen. Clock correct, last exercise logged, no fault or warning on the display.
• Clearance kept. Nothing stacked against the enclosure, and the shrubs that looked fine in March cut back before they close off the airflow.
• Propane gauge, if you have a tank. Read it, write it down, and top off before the season rather than during it; the fuel guide explains why the May reading is the one that matters.
• Nothing inside the electrical compartment. The walk-around stops at the enclosure door. Terminals, the charger and the transfer switch are the technician's.

Once a year the unit gets a technician: oil and filter, a battery load test, fuel pressure read at the regulator, a transfer test under real load, the enclosure and wiring inspected. The maintenance page lists what that visit covers; this page is about when. In coastal Georgia the answer is late winter through spring, so the machine goes into June freshly serviced and you are not competing for a technician's calendar in the rush that starts the moment a storm gets a name. Put it on the same week every year and it stops being a decision.

Two events move every date: a multi-day run and a flood. A unit that carried the house for four days in an outage has done a year's worth of engine hours in a week, and the oil-and-filter item comes forward to now, with the louvers cleared and the fault history read before the next forecast. The run-hour intervals for those items are set by the unit's own manual, which lives in the enclosure door, and the controller's hour meter is the clock; we don't reprint the intervals here because they differ from unit to unit. A unit that took water stays off until it has been inspected, whatever the calendar says. The storm-week playbook covers the walk-around before the restart.

Some parts are replaced on evidence rather than on a date. The starter battery is the big one: it is load-tested at every annual visit and swapped when the test says so, not after it has failed in an outage. Liquid-cooled whole-home units carry coolant that coastal heat is unkind to. On island and marsh-front installs, salt air works on enclosure hinges, fasteners and terminals, and those get replaced as they pit rather than after they fail. And once in a while the schedule surfaces a different finding: the house has grown past the machine. That is a sizing conversation first, on the sizing guide, and then a look at how a larger generator installation is priced in Savannah before anyone spends more on an undersized unit.

Hour meter — the controller's running total of engine hours; it decides when the run-hour items come due. Exercise timer — the weekly unloaded self-test and its set day and time. Load bank — the test load a technician brings so the unit is proven under real current. Low-oil shutdown — the controller's protection for an engine on degraded oil, and the commonest way a long run ends. Regulator — where gas pressure is read on a natural-gas unit. Transfer test — the forced handoff that proves the automatic transfer switch moves the house over and back. Enclosure louvers — the intake and exhaust slats the monthly walk-around keeps clear.