Generator Installation in Cornish, Maine

Power reaches Cornish over lines strung across farmland, woods and river valley, and the big statewide storms find it like anywhere else. Two set the scale: the 1998 ice storm, which cut power to about 700,000 Maine residents, and the October 2017 windstorm, whose 400,000-plus outages made it the largest weather-related outage event in Maine’s history. In spring 2023, flash flooding just over the line in Limington was the worst in York County and closed part of Douglas Road near the Cornish line. A long outage here means cold rooms, a silent well pump and a sump pump that has stopped, often while fallen trees block the roads.

Houses on the Cornish Water District’s metered supply have no pump of their own to lose, but anyone drawing from a private well is out of water as soon as the lines go dead. Oil boilers, the heat source in about 72 percent of occupied homes here, also stop without electricity for burner, controls and circulators. A standby generator paired with an automatic transfer switch picks all of that up within seconds and needs nobody at home to start it. The cheaper route is a portable unit feeding an inlet and interlock kit, which keeps the essentials running and cannot push power back onto CMP’s wires while crews work on them. Never run a generator in a garage or basement, even with the door up; the carbon monoxide risk means it belongs outdoors, well away from the house.

Cornish has no piped natural gas, so standby units here generally burn propane, and the tank decides how many days they last. Siting takes care among close-set village houses and on riverside lots: exhaust pointed away from windows and doors, the required clearances from the building, and, where they apply, the town’s 2024 floodplain ordinance and the Saco River Corridor rules. Goodnow Electric matches the generator to the loads the house really has, puts in the transfer switch or interlock, and files for the state electrical permit and the inspection that follows. A transfer switch installed on its own does not bring in the outdoor-disconnect requirement. The written estimate is free and covers runtime and fuel use in plain terms, and the owner is there for the install.