Generator Installation in Biddeford, Maine

Biddeford's coastline, which includes Hills Beach, Biddeford Pool, Fortunes Rocks and Granite Point, takes the brunt of winter storms. On January 13, 2024, with Portland's gauge reading 14.57 feet, a new record, Biddeford closed and barricaded every road down to the water. Wind reaches the whole city, which is on Central Maine Power lines: the nor'easter of October 2017 knocked out more than 400,000 Maine customers, a number of them for over a week, and the December 2023 storm cut roughly 300,000 more. The city also has almost 15 miles of frontage on the Saco River, and its wooded inland roads carry lines exposed to falling trees.

In a Biddeford outage, heat is usually the first problem. Roughly 64 percent of Biddeford homes burn oil, and no oil boiler fires without power for its burner and pumps. Older houses and multi-family buildings with basement boilers and sump pumps are especially vulnerable when power fails during heavy rain, and a house with its own well has no running water until the power returns. Propane heats about 13 percent of homes and piped gas about 8 percent, and those owners may be able to run a standby unit off the tank or gas line already in place. For a multi-unit building, a generator sized for the shared boiler, the sump pump and common lighting may make more sense than one for each apartment.

The two usual setups differ in who does the work when the lights go out. A permanent standby unit, wired through an automatic transfer switch, senses the loss and picks up the house in seconds with nobody home; a portable machine costs less but has to be rolled out and plugged into an inlet, with an interlock on the panel so it can never push power back onto the street. On the coast, placement matters. Equipment near Biddeford Pool and Fortunes Rocks should sit above expected flood levels and be protected from salt spray with corrosion-resistant enclosures and hardware, and the city maintains FEMA flood map information that affects where it can go. Goodnow Electric sizes the load and settles the location with you, and because Biddeford's code office books inspections at least 48 hours out, the permit and final inspection are written into the schedule from the start rather than left to the last day.