Wind, ice and heavy wet snow take lines down here every winter, and rural properties tend to be last back on. The time to sort out backup power is before the first storm, not during it.
What actually stops working
People think about lights first, but lights are the least of it.
- Water: if you are on a private well, no power means no water at all. No taps, no toilets. This is the single biggest difference between an outage in town and an outage out in the county.
- Heat: even a gas furnace needs electricity for the blower, the ignition and the controls. Without power it does not run.
- Refrigeration: a full freezer buys you a day or two if you keep the door shut, and less than that if you do not.
- Sump pumps: an outage during a thaw is exactly when you need one working.
Well pumps are common in the areas we serve outside the city, see our pages for Deer Park and Otis Orchards.
The one thing you should never do
Do not plug a generator into a wall outlet to power your house. This is called backfeeding, and it pushes power backward through your panel and out onto the utility line. It can energize a line that Avista crews believe is dead. It also bypasses every protective device in your house.
This is why transfer switches and interlock kits exist, why they are required, and why the installation is inspected. It is not paperwork.
Portable or standby
Both work. They solve different problems.
A portable generator with a properly installed interlock kit or manual transfer switch is far less expensive and covers the essentials: well pump, furnace, fridge, a few circuits. The catch is that you have to be home to start it, you have to fuel it, and you have to go outside in the weather to do both.
A standby generator starts itself, runs on natural gas or propane, and can carry the whole house or a critical-loads panel. It costs considerably more and involves a fuel connection as well as the electrical work.
Which one is right depends on how often you actually lose power and for how long. If it is twice a winter for a few hours, a portable and an interlock is usually the sensible answer. If it is multi-day outages and you are on a well, a standby starts to make sense. We would rather tell you that honestly than sell you the bigger unit.
Sizing it
Sizing is not about square footage. It is about which loads have to run at the same time, and which of them are hard to start. Well pumps and furnace blowers draw a surge on startup well above their running load, and that surge is usually what determines the size of the generator rather than the total wattage on the nameplate.
The other question is whether you want the whole panel backed up or a critical-loads sub-panel. A smaller generator feeding a well-chosen set of circuits often beats a larger one trying to carry everything.
Permits and inspection
Generator wiring requires an electrical permit and inspection. In most of the Spokane region that comes from Washington State Labor and Industries; inside the City of Spokane, the city handles it. A standby install with a gas line will typically also need a separate permit from the city or county.
More on that here: do you need a permit for electrical work in Spokane.
While you are at it: surge protection
Outages are hard on electronics, and the damage often happens when the power comes back rather than when it goes out. Whole-home surge protection installs at the panel and is inexpensive relative to what it protects.
Do it in the fall
Every year the calls come in during the first real storm, which is the week nobody has availability and nothing can be inspected quickly. September and October are the right time to get this sorted.
Ready to talk through options? See generator installation in Spokane.
Filed under Electrical Safety.