What Size Generator Does a Savannah House Actually Need?
Kilowatts are the whole ballgame. Undersize and the unit sheds your AC in the August outage you bought it for; oversize and you paid thousands for capacity that idles. The right number comes from a load calculation — but this page gets you close enough to budget.
Partial-home vs. whole-home: the first fork
Every sizing conversation starts with one question: during an outage, does this house run normally, or does it run carefully? A partial-home (essentials) setup backs up a chosen set of circuits — refrigeration, lights, outlets, maybe one cooling zone — and asks you to live a little smaller until the grid returns. A whole-home setup carries everything at once, no thinking required. Neither answer is wrong; they're different budgets buying different August afternoons. Load-management modules blur the line usefully: a mid-size unit can serve a whole panel by briefly shedding big appliances when the AC compressor kicks, which is how many Savannah homes get whole-home behavior out of a 16–20kW machine.
The kW ranges, mapped to real houses
| Coverage level | kW range | What stays on | Typical Savannah fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials only | 10–14kW | Fridge/freezer, lights, outlets, internet, well pump or one window/mini-split of cooling | Smaller homes, tight budgets, second homes |
| Whole-home, typical | 18–26kW | Central AC included — the full house, often with load management smoothing the peaks | The standard 3–4 bedroom metro house |
| Large home | 26kW+ | Dual HVAC systems, pool pump, workshop, electric vehicle charging | 3,500+ sq ft, marsh-front & estate lots |
Ranges assume gas appliances for heat and cooking; an all-electric house shifts up a bracket faster than owners expect.
The three loads that decide your number
- Air conditioning tonnage. The single biggest line in any coastal-Georgia load calc. A compressor's starting surge is several times its running draw, and Savannah houses commonly carry 3.5–5 tons — sometimes across two systems. Soft-start kits can tame the surge and occasionally save you a whole generator size; we check for the option on every visit.
- Well pumps. Out toward Bryan and Effingham county acreage, water arrives by pump — and a 1–2 HP well pump has a hard-starting motor that must be in the calculation, because an outage without water is a different emergency than an outage without AC. It's a main reason Richmond Hill quotes trend a size larger.
- Water heating. A gas water heater barely registers. An electric tank draws hard, and an electric tankless unit can single-handedly demand more than a small generator produces. Knowing which one your house has changes the recommendation before we've opened the panel.
What the sizing visit looks like
Twenty to thirty minutes: we inventory the panel, read the nameplate data on the AC and any pumps, note the water-heating fuel, and talk honestly about which circuits matter to your household at 2am in an outage. You get a recommended kW figure, the fuel plan, and an installed price range from the installation page tiers — in writing, before any commitment. If the answer is "the smaller unit with a load-management module," that's the answer we give, and your budget keeps the difference.
Get the number measured, not guessed.
Sizing visits across Savannah, Pooler, Richmond Hill, Rincon, Wilmington Island & Georgetown.
Call (912) 454-6565