Generac Generator Case Study

Interview With Pat From Hocking County, Ohio

Pat has lived and worked in some of Ohio's larger cities for most of her adult career and recently moved to Hocking County for retirement She bought a Guardian Generator from Ed Green Electric in 2009 and was very happy to share her story.

"I’m so pleased with it (Guardian Generator).  I had to have a propane tank installed for it and , oh, Matt Green’s company (Ed Green Electric) was fantastic.  I mean, they took care of the whole thing, subcontracted where they had to and I didn’t have to worry about a thing.'

' I had a little Troy-Bilt™ gasoline generator and it would fill the bill once in a while but of course it’s a pain because you have to haul the gas around and the gas gets stale and you have to change it and one thing and another.  Mice built nests in it and when we had that terrible ice storm last year it crumped and I couldn’t get it started.  I was out of power for nine days.  That convinced me because I thought, well look at me ten years from now, I might be using a cane.  I won’t be in any condition to be hauling gasoline cans around.  I should invest in something for the future if I’m going to stay here or give up and move to the city.  You think about things like that.  Matt Green is the one that had installed the switch for my gasoline generator and so I knew of him, so I wrote him this email one day and I said “I need to get a generator I don’t need to worry about,  Can you fix me up with a generator that I’ve read about that starts up all by itself and I said, can you loan me a little bit of money because I probably can’t afford the whole thing right now and what about propane, I don’t have any propane and he just wrote back and said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and so that was the way we did it.  He made it so easy for me."

." I knew I had to make a decision to fix this up right so it will be comfortable for me for the next ten, twenty – I hope 50 years, or else make some big decisions here in the next three or four years; maybe move someplace where it’s easier.  I decided on the former.  I have ten acres and my cabin is almost in the middle of my property.  The deer come, I have wildlife galore so it’s really what I like."

Interviewer:  How big of a propane tank did you get?

"It was 250 gallons and no worry about the fuel going stale.  The propane man said, 'I won’t be visiting you very often if this is all you are using this big tank for', so I feel so secure with it."

Interviewer:  How many days/hours would that tank last if you were using it full time?

"I think they said it would last about 8 days.  They said to keep an eye on it if you are running it for a while and call us when it gets down to about 20% so they have a couple of days leeway to come and fill it up.  I’ve had probably about six (power) outages.  Some were just about 40 minutes long and others were a couple hours long and then one was almost all day.  I was sitting one morning reading the paper; the lights and radio all went out and I thought, GENERATOR!; and I counted one Mississippi, two all the way up to ten because it’s supposed to be ten seconds and it kicks in.  Sure enough, brrm, brrm and I could hear it start, but it’s very quiet.  Compared to that gasoline generator, I have to kind of strain my ears to hear it in the house and it’s just so nice and it runs everything.  It runs the furnace.  It runs everything and it’s got a feature where if it has to it cuts out nonessential  circuits so that it can run the furnace for a while and after the furnace turns off then it turns those circuits back on but I haven’t detected that it has had to do that at all.  The generator is in a case about five feet long and two feet high by three feet wide – something like that.  I had built a little shed with plenty of ventilation space in it for the gas generator and they just put it right in there.  They said it was okay but I did raise the roof to give it a little more vent space at the top so it's sheltered from the weather and I don’t have to do anything.  It’s setting on a wood base and its mouse proof.  You know I had that experience with mice building the nests in the other thing and I went out and felt up in the vents on the side and there’s like a ¼” real thick protective screening on the inside and that caused me to go and look up more information on it on the internet and sure enough it says that it’s rodent proofed.  It’s made to deter rodents, snakes and anything else that might otherwise climb up in there and build a nest – they just can’t get in there.  The peace of mind is worth everything.  Even if it didn’t run all year it’s still worth it because of the peace of mind that it gives you.  That was awful during that ice storm.  I didn’t have anything, the water pump and nothing ran, so I thought I know, I’m a pioneer woman and I’ll go chip ice over the edge of the roof and heat it up over the wood stove.  It took over an hour to get enough water to flush the toilet.  It’s a big inconvenience to get water.  The wood stove was great though, even in the basement it didn’t get below 40 degrees during that whole time, but I’d have to set my alarm clock for 3:00 a.m. in the morning or the fire would go out and I’d have to rekindle everything.  Every day you are praying, oh, I wish it would come back on today.  We have quite a few outages caused by a variety of problems from falling tree limbs to squirrels on the transformers."

Interviewer:  How long did it take to get the generator installed?

"From the time I called, it was maybe two and a half weeks; they got right on it."

Interviewer:  What was your total cost for the system?

"Generator, propane tank, everything around $9,000.  They do really nice work.  You don’t even know they’ve been here, they clean up everything.  They are fast.  It took them less than three days total.  I was very pleased with them.  They’ve got this Internet site you can get right on and ask for service.  That’s just a big plus to me, in fact, when I first was thinking of getting the generator, I remembered that he had a website and so I looked for his name and of course got a hold of the website then. That’s when I poured my heart out and luckily he happened to be there right then because he answered me back within minutes.  I was so impressed because the response was yes we can do this, yes, we can do that . . . I said you’re hired."