Natural Gas or Propane for Your Standby Generator?

Start with a fact that takes the pressure off: the machines themselves are agnostic. Nearly every residential standby model ships able to burn either fuel, and a technician switches it over with a factory conversion during setup. Nobody is choosing between two different generators — you are choosing between two ways of feeding the same one.

That turns a shopping decision into a plumbing question. Walk outside. If a gas meter is mounted on your house, a main already runs under your street, and connecting the generator to it is routine pipe-fitting we perform on most projects in Savannah proper, Pooler, Georgetown, and the newer gas-served subdivisions. If no meter exists — common across outlying Effingham and Bryan county roads, and true for plenty of established homes closer in — then extending a main to reach you is the utility's project, on the utility's calendar, at a cost that rarely makes sense for a single residence. Out there, a propane tank is not the consolation prize; it is the correct engineering answer, and thousands of coastal-Georgia standby systems run happily on LP.

So the honest framing is narrower than the internet debates suggest: if city gas reaches you, use it. If it doesn't, design a good propane system. The remaining questions — tank size, tank placement, line diameter — are exactly what a site visit exists to settle.

Two edge cases are worth naming. A handful of gas-served streets carry older, lower-pressure service that struggles to feed the biggest units, and we verify available pressure before ordering anything rather than discovering the shortfall at startup. And a few homeowners with a meter still ask about propane for independence reasons; that setup works, but it trades away the no-tank convenience that makes city gas attractive in the first place, so we talk it through honestly before anyone commits.

Both fuels keep a properly installed unit running through a Savannah outage. Where they differ is logistics — what sits in your yard, what you monitor, and what has to happen during the messiest week of the year.

Less than you might fear. The four pricing tiers on our installation page describe complete projects on either fuel, and kilowatt rating remains the dominant lever in every one of them. On a natural-gas job, running and sizing the pipe from your meter is simply part of the scope — an unusually long run shifts you within your tier rather than into a different conversation.

Propane projects add real line items: the tank itself, its placement, and the trench that connects it. Because tank arrangements vary — owned versus leased, buried versus above-ground, and supplier terms that differ house to house — we quote that portion after walking your property rather than publishing a figure that would be wrong half the time. What we can promise is the same format either way: one itemized written quote after the site visit, with the fuel work spelled out as its own line instead of buried in a lump sum.

One more planning note for LP households: the generator can often share a tank with existing propane appliances, but the combined draw has to be calculated, not assumed. A range and a water heater sipping from the same reserve as a generator under full load will drain it faster than the tank chart on the fridge suggests. That check happens during the same visit, alongside the load measurement, so the quote you receive already reflects the tank capacity your household actually needs rather than a generic assumption.