Every November, right around the first wet snow that takes the power out for an evening, our phone starts ringing with the same question: what size generator do I need?
It’s the right question. It just has a wrong answer circulating everywhere — because every online generator sizing calculator starts by asking your square footage, and square footage is nearly useless for sizing a generator. We’ve installed backup power in 1,200-square-foot homes that needed more generator than 4,000-square-foot ones. What matters isn’t how big the house is. It’s what has to run, and — this is the part everyone misses — what it takes to start.
North Country outages have taught us how to size these systems so they work the night they’re needed. Here’s the whole framework.
Why starting loads are the whole game
Look at your well pump’s nameplate and it might say 10 amps. Simple, right? Add up a few numbers like that and buy a generator with headroom.
Except that pump doesn’t draw 10 amps when it starts. For the first fraction of a second, an electric motor can demand two to three times its running current to get spinning. Your furnace blower does it. Your sump pump does it. Every compressor in every fridge and freezer does it.
Now play the ice-storm scenario: power’s been out for an hour, everything is cold, and the moment the generator takes the load, the well pump, the furnace, and both refrigeration compressors all try to start at once. A generator sized to the running loads — the calculator’s answer — stalls right there, in the dark, in the sleet, with your family watching you hold a flashlight.
That’s why real generator sizing starts with a load inventory: what must run, what can wait, and what the worst simultaneous starting demand actually is. It’s also why two identical-looking houses can need completely different systems. A home on a drilled well with electric water heating is a different animal than one on village water with a propane boiler — and around here, that’s often the difference between neighbors.
Whole-home standby, essential circuits, or portable?
There are three honest answers to backup power, at three price points. We install all three, and we’ll tell you plainly which one your situation justifies.
Whole-home standby. An automatic generator sized to carry everything, transferring within seconds of an outage. The house doesn’t notice; the outage becomes something you read about on Facebook. This is the premium answer, and what you’re buying is convenience — nobody needs every circuit live during a storm, but it is genuinely wonderful, and for larger homes that entertain or rent, it’s often the right call.
Essential-circuits standby. A smaller automatic unit feeding a selected panel of circuits: heat, well pump, refrigeration, the kitchen, some lights, the internet. This is the sweet spot for most year-round North Country homes — meaningfully cheaper than whole-home, still fully automatic, and it protects everything that actually matters. The design conversation (“which circuits make the cut?”) takes twenty minutes and is honestly kind of fun.
A portable with an inlet and interlock. A properly installed generator inlet and a panel interlock let a portable generator feed your house safely through the panel — heat, pump, fridge, lights — at a fraction of standby cost. It requires you to be home to deploy it, and it requires doing it safely, which is a big enough topic that we wrote a whole article on portable generator hookups. But as a first rung on the backup-power ladder, it’s excellent value.
Sizing a generator for a camp is a different problem entirely
Here’s where our region parts ways with the national advice.
For a year-round home, backup power is about comfort and continuity — people are present during the outage, so water, heat, kitchen, and normal life lead the priority list, and multi-day runtime drives the fuel planning.
For a seasonal camp, the question inverts completely: it’s not about the outage you’re there for, it’s about the one nobody sees. The camp generator’s real job list is short and specific — keep the heat on (if you winter above freezing), keep the sump running through the January thaw, keep the freeze-protection circuits alive. That usually means a smaller automatic unit than owners expect, paired with remote monitoring so you actually know it ran.
We’ve seen the alternative: a camp that lost power for four days in February, quietly, with no one watching. The pipes made the introduction between the owner and us. Backup power plus monitoring at a seasonal property isn’t a luxury — it’s the cheapest form of caretaking there is.
Propane, natural gas, or gasoline?
Fuel decides more than most buyers think, and geography decides fuel.
Propane stores indefinitely, doesn’t gum up carburetors, and suits seasonal properties perfectly — which is why it dominates camp installs. Tank sizing is part of our design: a standby generator under real load draws fuel faster than people expect, and the tank that runs the boiler all winter isn’t automatically sized to also run a generator for four days.
Natural gas, where it exists (parts of the villages), means never thinking about fuel at all — the premium convenience pick.
Gasoline is the portable’s fuel, and its weakness: it goes stale, it needs you present, and it needs to be fresh. Last November’s gas is the number-one reason portables don’t start this November.
Up the long private roads — Keene, Wilmington, the lake roads where the outages run longest — we lean toward generous propane storage, because around here the outages that matter aren’t measured in hours.
The install is half the system
A generator on a pallet is not backup power. The system is the pad, the fuel coordination with your supplier, the transfer switch (automatic or interlock), the permit and inspection, the commissioning under real load, and the walkthrough where you learn exactly what happens when the grid drops — in what order, and what to do if it doesn’t.
And then the unglamorous part that determines whether the whole investment works in year five: maintenance. Oil, filters, battery, an annual check. Standby units run weekly self-tests, which helps, but a generator that’s been ignored since it was installed is a hypothesis, not a plan. We set every owner up with a simple schedule, and for camps we fold it into the spring opening visit.
One piece of timing advice
The generator business has a rhythm: every major storm produces a wave of demand, and equipment lead times stretch just when everyone wants a unit now. The best time to size and order a system is before the season — which, if you’re reading this in November, is this week, not January.
Start with the load inventory — it’s a walk through your house with a notepad, it costs you nothing, and it turns “what size generator do I need?” from a Google search into a number with your name on it.