Emergency Power
When a disaster strikes your property or business, our goal is to restore power as quickly as possible. Our experienced and certified team will determine the amount of power that is necessary and arrange the delivery, installation, and maintenance of the equipment needed to restore power to your home, building or office to make emergency repairs.
An emergency power system is an independent source of electrical power that supports important electrical systems on loss of normal power supply. A standby power system may include a standby generator, batteries and other apparatus. Emergency power systems are installed to protect life and property from the consequences of loss of primary electric power supply.
They find uses in a wide variety of settings from homes to hospitals, scientific laboratories, data centers, telecommunication equipment and ships. Emergency power systems can rely on generators, deep cycle batteries, flywheel energy storage or hydrogen fuel cells.
Mains power can be lost due to downed lines, malfunctions at a sub-station, inclement weather, planned blackouts or in extreme cases a grid-wide failure. In modern buildings, most emergency power systems have been and are still based on generators. Usually, these generators are Diesel engine driven, although smaller buildings may use a gasoline engine driven generator and larger ones a gas turbine. However, lately, more use is being made of deep cycle batteries and other technologies such as flywheel energy storage or fuel cells. These latter systems do not produce polluting gases, thereby allowing the placement to be done within the building. Also, as a second advantage, they do not require a separate shed to be built for fuel storage.
A wide variety of natural disasters can cause long-term power outages. Things like tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, lightning, ice storms and blizzards can take out the power for hours or days at a time. Even something as simple as a blown transformer or a car running into a utility pole can knock out the electricity in an entire neighborhood for a day or two.
We are all dependent on electricity, so a power outage of more than a few minutes becomes pretty annoying. As the duration of a power failure stretches beyond an hour, there are more severe problems that can cause things to get expensive or dangerous:
- During the winter, a power failure normally disables your home’s heating system. As the house cools, (depending on where you live) it can become uninhabitable. In addition, frozen pipes can cause thousands of dollars in damage.
- A power failure means that refrigerators and freezers stop running. In the summer, frozen food melts and can make a real mess. If you have invested in a side of beef, losses can reach $1,000 or more during a multi-day power failure.
- If you have a medical condition that requires special equipment, a power failure can create a life-or-death situation.
- If you live in a rural area with a private well, a power failure cuts off your water supply.
It is now easy to buy an emergency power system to avoid all of these problems. In this article, we will look at several options and also discuss different ways to wire them into your home so that you will never have to worry about a power failure again.