Generator Installation in Gorham, Maine

Central Maine Power serves Gorham, and with more than 50 square miles of mostly wooded and rural land, the town has long stretches of overhead line between its villages. That exposure shows during big wind events. In October 2017 a nor'easter cut power to over 400,000 Maine customers, some of them for more than a week, a bigger weather outage than even the 1998 ice storm had caused; in December 2023 another storm darkened about 300,000. Crews restore the trunk lines before the branches, so a house at the end of a long rural feeder in North or West Gorham is often among the last to come back.

A long outage in Gorham is rarely just a matter of lights. With about 60 percent of homes on oil heat, the boiler or furnace needs electricity for its burner and circulators, and in January a house can drop toward freezing in a day. Many rural properties draw water from private wells, which stop the moment power goes out, and sump pumps in the Little River and Stroudwater drainages are needed most during the same storms that take lines down. Where a house already burns propane, about 14 percent of Gorham homes, or is on the gas main, about 12 percent, the generator can usually tap that supply instead of needing a tank of its own.

With an automatic transfer switch, a permanently mounted standby unit fires up unattended and has the house running again a few seconds into an outage. Spending less means a portable machine: plugged into an inlet box, with an interlock on the panel, it can run the furnace, well, refrigerator and a few circuits safely, without ever backfeeding the utility line and endangering line crews. Sizing starts with the loads that actually matter in your house, including the starting current of a well pump or heat pump. Goodnow Electric plans the pad location with setbacks and clearances in mind, checks shoreland rules for properties near the Presumpscot River, and pulls the electrical permit through Gorham's code office for inspection. A generator that runs a heat pump needs to be sized for its starting surge, not just its running load, which is worth settling before the unit is ordered.