What size generator do I need?

Everything with a motor (pumps, blowers, compressors) draws a surge when it starts that can be several times what it draws once it's running. A refrigerator hums along on a modest load but kicks hard every time its compressor starts.

This is why sizing charts based on square footage are useless. What matters is the list of loads that have to run simultaneously, plus the biggest startup surge landing on top of them. In practice, that surge, usually the well pump or the furnace blower, sets the generator size more often than the total wattage does.

In the Inland Northwest, outages come with weather (ice, wind, snow), which concentrates the list of things that genuinely can't wait:

Everything else, lights, outlets, the internet, is comfort. Important comfort, but comfort, and it's cheap to carry once the essentials are covered.

Whole-panel backup means the generator has to be sized for everything you might run, including the loads you don't need during an outage. A critical-loads sub-panel moves the essentials onto their own small panel, and the generator backs up only that.

The smaller option usually wins: a modest generator carrying the well, heat, refrigeration, and sump pump reliably is a better outcome than a large one sized for the range and the dryer you can simply not use during an outage. We lay out both when we size a system, and we'll tell you honestly when whole-panel is worth it: for some homes it is.

Portable: lower cost, stored until needed, and flexible, but you're the automatic transfer switch. You wheel it out, fuel it, start it, and connect it, usually in the dark, in whatever weather knocked the power out. If you travel or the outage hits at 2 a.m., it sits in the garage.

Standby: permanently installed, starts itself within seconds of an outage whether you're home or not, and runs on the home's fuel supply so there's no refueling in a storm. Higher upfront cost, and the right answer for well properties, frequent travelers, and anyone with medical equipment.

Neither is universally better. The honest question is who will be home, in what weather, to do the work a portable requires.

Backfeeding, connecting a generator to a receptacle to energize the house, sends power backward through your service and out onto the utility line. The line the neighborhood thinks is dead is now live, and the people at risk are the Avista crews working to restore it.

This is exactly what transfer switches and interlocks exist to prevent: they make it physically impossible for the generator and the utility to be connected at once. That equipment is required, it's inspected, and it's not optional decoration. Our generator installation page covers the options, and rural well properties are a big part of our Deer Park-area work.

The transfer switch or interlock and its wiring are permitted electrical work, inspected like anything else. In the Spokane region, electrical permits and inspections come from Washington Labor & Industries everywhere except the City of Spokane, which runs its own program. In Idaho, every electrical permit starts at the state DOPL portal, which routes the job to whichever authority covers the address. We handle the permit and inspection as part of the job.