Standby Generator Installation

What outages actually look like around here

It is worth being precise about this, because the honest case for a generator in Bucks and Montgomery County is not the one usually made.

By the Public Utility Commission's own reliability figures, PECO's customers lose power less often than the benchmark — a 2023 rolling-year SAIFI of 0.74, beating its target by nearly 40%. What PECO missed was CAIDI, the average time to get a customer back on: 138 minutes against a benchmark it exceeded by 23%, and up from 99 minutes the year before. Only three of Pennsylvania's eleven electric utilities hit all three reliability benchmarks that year.

So the pattern here is infrequent but long. The single biggest cause is vegetation — broken and uprooted trees have been the number one outage cause statewide every year since 2015, and were PECO's top cause of customer-minutes lost, incidents, and customers affected. Mature tree cover is most of what makes these townships pleasant to live in, and it is also what takes the lines down.

For a concrete sense of scale: a thunderstorm on 20 June 2025 lasting roughly an hour, with 55 mph winds, knocked out power to about 327,000 PECO customers. By nine that evening roughly 21,300 were still dark in Montgomery County and 12,400 in Bucks. PECO had around 1,400 contractors working alongside its own crews.

If your house is on a well, has a sump pump, or holds someone who depends on powered medical equipment, a multi-hour outage is a different problem from an inconvenient one. That is the case for backup power here — not that it happens constantly, but that when it happens you are waiting.

Whole-house or just the circuits that matter

The first real decision is scope, and it drives most of the cost.

• Essential circuits. A smaller unit feeding a subpanel: furnace or boiler controls, refrigerator, well pump, sump pump, a few lights and outlets. Cheaper to buy and to install, and it covers the reasons most people actually want backup power.

• Whole house. Everything, including central air. Costs more, needs a larger gas supply, and takes up more room — but nobody has to think about what is and is not on the generator during an outage.

Air conditioning is usually what pushes a house from one category to the other. A single condenser's startup draw can be most of a small generator's capacity on its own, which is why load management — shedding the air conditioning for a moment when something larger starts — often does more for the final price than buying up a size.

Where it can physically sit

This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth checking before you fall in love with a location.

A standby generator is mechanical equipment, and in most municipalities here that means it is subject to setback rules. Doylestown Borough, for example, routes every electrical and mechanical permit through Zoning and will not allow equipment in a required setback yard. Add the manufacturer's own clearances from windows, doors and combustible walls, plus a gas meter that has to be within reach, and on a narrow lot the set of legal positions can come down to one. Noise ordinances vary township to township as well.

Which utility you are actually on

Most of Bucks and Montgomery County is PECO for both electricity and gas — but not all of it, and the exceptions matter when you are arranging a gas line or a meter upgrade.

• PPL, not PECO, serves upper Bucks and upper Montgomery — including Souderton and Telford, along with Richlandtown, Sellersville, Silverdale, Trumbauersville, Hilltown, Milford and others.

• Perkasie and Quakertown run their own municipal electric utilities. Perkasie has owned its distribution system since 1947 and Quakertown's dates to the early 1890s. Neither is PUC-regulated, and neither has retail electric choice.

• Propane is the answer where there is no gas main, which is common on the larger lots in the upper end of both counties. It changes the tank siting conversation and the fuel logistics, not the generator itself.

Permits and inspection

A generator installation is both electrical and mechanical work, and it needs a permit essentially everywhere in these two counties. Doylestown Borough puts it plainly: any new installation of electrical, heating or air conditioning equipment requires one, and that includes replacements.

Permits here are municipal, not county. Pennsylvania's Uniform Construction Code sets the floor, but over 90% of the state's 2,562 municipalities administer and enforce it themselves, each with its own office, fees and inspection scheduling. Every municipality in Bucks County has opted in. Municipalities that opted in before 1999 may also carry local amendments that exceed the state baseline — and the state openly says it has no record of what those amendments are, so there is no central place to look them up.

One thing worth knowing in advance: the sewage and well permits go the other way. Those are issued by the county health department, not your township. A project that touches both — a bathroom addition on a septic system, say — needs two offices rather than one.

Pennsylvania requires anyone doing more than $5,000 a year of home improvement work to register with the Attorney General's office. Registration numbers start with "PA", carry minimum insurance requirements, and are searchable on the state's public register. Contracts for work over $500 must also give you three days to cancel. Asking for the number is reasonable and every registered contractor expects it.