Generator Install in New Hampshire, New Jersey & Southern Maine

Two machines get called a generator

A portable is an engine on wheels. You roll it out, fuel it by hand, and connect it through a manual transfer switch or a panel interlock. A permanently installed standby generator sits outside on a pad, runs on propane or natural gas, starts itself seconds after the power drops, and shuts down when the utility comes back. Nobody has to be home.

The real difference is attention. A portable needs someone awake to start it and refuel it every several hours, and it has to stay well clear of the house, because carbon monoxide from a portable run in a garage or near a window kills people every winter. Across a multi-day outage that is a full-time job. This page covers choosing and installing either one. Servicing a unit you already own lives on our generator maintenance page.

Whole house, or the circuits that matter

There are two honest paths. Whole-home means the generator carries your entire panel and you live normally. Essential-circuit means a smaller unit feeds a defined set of loads and you skip the range and the hot tub for a few days. The second costs considerably less and still covers what an outage here actually threatens.

• Heat. The burner, controls and circulators all run on electricity. A full oil tank heats nothing without them.
• The well pump. No power means no water, and no toilets either.
• The sump or sewage ejector pump.
• The refrigerator and a freezer.
• Lights, outlets for phones, internet gear, and any medical equipment.

Generator size is not set by the sum of running watts. It is set by starting surge, and the well pump usually decides it. A submersible pump draws several times its running current the instant it starts, and a generator that cannot absorb that will stall. Air conditioning behaves the same way. So we look at motor loads specifically. A soft starter on the condenser, or a load management module that sheds the big consumers, often lets a smaller and less expensive unit do a bigger job. Code allows sizing to what that management system permits on at once rather than to everything connected.

Fuel, and the cold-weather catch

Where a gas main runs down the street, natural gas is the simple answer: unlimited runtime, nothing to refill. The catch is capacity. A standby generator is one of the largest gas loads a house will ever carry, and your meter, regulator and piping were sized for a furnace and a water heater. Undersized pipe starves the engine, so the unit surges and drops out under load, which looks like a broken generator and is not. We calculate demand and pipe run before quoting, and sometimes the utility has to set a larger meter.

Off the mains, and much of rural New Hampshire and southern Maine is off the mains, it is propane. Everyone asks about tank volume. The question that actually bites is vaporization. Liquid propane has to boil into vapor at the wall of the tank, and cold slows that down. On a subzero night with a half-empty tank, a small tank cannot make vapor fast enough to feed a running generator, and the unit quits at the worst possible time. We size the tank to the vaporization rate at design temperature, not just to days of runtime.

The transfer switch, siting, and permits

The transfer switch matters more than the generator and gets less attention. It disconnects your house from the utility before it connects you to the generator, so power can never flow back onto a line a crew is working on. An automatic switch rides out a short delay to ignore blinks, starts and warms the engine, transfers, then transfers back and lets the engine cool once utility power holds. Service-rated switches sit ahead of your main panel. Others feed a subpanel of chosen circuits.

Placement answers to three rulebooks at once: the manufacturer's manual, local code, and the propane supplier's separation distances. The strictest number wins. The unit goes near the house but clear of anything that breathes - operable windows, doors, dryer and crawl space vents, and the soffit intakes above it, since exhaust that finds an intake ends up indoors. It needs open room at the front and ends for cooling air and for service access. We pull the electrical and fuel permits and meet the inspector.

What the footprint does to the job

December ice storms are why this equipment exists here. Freezing rain loads limbs until they come down across rural distribution lines, and the same weather slows the crews sent to clear them, so outages run days instead of hours. Along the coast, nor'easters do it with wind. Design for the long version, not the two-hour flicker.

Private wells change the arithmetic. Where your water comes from a drilled well on your own property, no electricity means no water at all, and a well pump's starting surge is more than most portables handle gracefully. That one fact pushes a lot of homes here toward standby.

Salt air on the Jersey Shore corrodes outdoor equipment, so enclosure quality and orientation to the prevailing wind matter more there than inland. On flood-prone lots the generator and the transfer switch belong above the flood elevation, because a unit on a low pad is scrap after one surge. In snow country we set the pad high enough that drifting and roof shed do not bury the air intake in February.

Why homeowners hand us this one

The work crosses trades. Electrical, gas or propane piping, a pad, and permits in two categories. High Ground is veteran owned and licensed across New Hampshire, northern and central New Jersey, and southern Maine, so one team does all of it and one company stands behind the result. When you call, a person answers.

Every installation carries our Lifetime Workmanship Guarantee. If something we did is not right, we come back and make it right, fast. Before we leave we load test the unit against your actual house, set the weekly exercise cycle, and walk you through exactly what happens at two in the morning when it starts on its own.

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