September 2026
Backup power means something different at seven thousand feet
In a town where the power goes out for an hour twice a year, a generator is a convenience. Up here it is closer to infrastructure. Storms take lines down on the East Fork more than once a year, Greer is the highest town we cover and its road can close, and a crew getting to a fault out on acreage in a January storm is not a one-hour proposition. The question is not really whether you want backup power. It is how many hours you need to cover and what you need running during them.
That question is worth answering before you shop, because the honest answer changes the equipment completely.
Start with what has to stay on
Almost nobody needs the whole house. What people actually need falls into a short list, and yours will be some subset of it.
- Heat. Not the furnace’s heat output, the furnace’s controls and blower, or the boiler’s circulators. A propane furnace with no power is a decoration.
- The well pump, if you are on a well. No power, no water, and no water in a freeze is a plumbing bill on top of an outage.
- The refrigerator and a freezer, especially in a house where people stock up because the store is a drive.
- Enough lighting and outlets to live normally, plus whatever charges phones and runs the internet.
- A septic pump, if your system has one.
- Medical equipment, if anybody in the house depends on it. That moves from a want to a requirement and it changes the whole conversation.
Add those up and you often land somewhere much smaller than a whole-house machine. A well pump is the item that usually drives the size, because a submersible pump’s starting surge is far larger than its running load and the generator has to swallow that without stalling.
The two real approaches
A standby unit on a transfer switch
A permanently installed generator sits outside on a pad, runs on propane or natural gas, and starts itself when the power drops. An automatic transfer switch disconnects the house from the utility and connects it to the generator, and it does that whether or not anybody is home. For a second home that sits empty through freeze season, that last part is the entire argument. A cabin that loses power in February while nobody is there does not care how good your portable generator is in the shed.
These units exercise themselves weekly, need fuel supply sized for them, and need a real installation: pad, fuel, the transfer switch tied into the service, and a permit. It is the more expensive path and the more capable one.
A portable plus an inlet and interlock
The other legitimate approach is a portable generator you roll out, with a permanently installed power inlet on the house and either a manual transfer switch or a listed breaker interlock kit at the panel. You start the machine, plug in one cord, and switch the panel over.
This is a real solution, not a lesser one, and for an occupied house where somebody is always around to start it, it covers a lot of ground for much less money. What makes it safe is the interlock or transfer switch, which makes it physically impossible to have the utility and the generator connected at the same time.
Which brings up the thing I will not be diplomatic about.
The extension cord into a dryer outlet
Backfeeding a house by running a cord from a generator into a dryer or range receptacle is genuinely dangerous and it happens up here every winter. Two things go wrong with it. Your generator’s output goes back out through your service and up the line at utility voltage, where a lineman working to restore your power has every reason to believe that line is dead. And when the utility comes back, it comes back onto a running generator that is not synchronized with it.
The fix is not expensive. An inlet and an interlock kit is a modest piece of work and it makes the whole thing safe and legal. If you own a portable generator and you have been backfeeding, that is the call to make before the first storm this year.
Sizing, honestly
Sizing is arithmetic, not opinion. The running watts of everything on the backup list, plus the largest motor’s starting surge, plus some margin. Well pumps and AC compressors are the surge items. Electric heat and electric water heaters are so large that they are usually left off the backup list entirely and dealt with by having propane or by accepting cold showers for a day.
Undersizing is the common mistake, and it does not show up as a polite warning. It shows up as a generator that stalls the first time the pump starts while the furnace is running, in the middle of the night, in a storm. Oversizing costs money and, on some fuel types, runs inefficiently at light load. The load calculation sits in the middle of those two and it is worth doing properly.
Fuel, weather and where it sits
Propane is the usual fuel here, and the tank has to be sized for the run time you actually want. A tank that gives you eighteen hours is not a plan for a three-day storm. Ask what your consumption would be at the load you are backing up, then look at your tank.
Placement matters more at elevation than it does elsewhere. The unit needs clearance from the house and from openings for exhaust reasons, it needs to be where snow slides off the roof will not bury or hit it, and it needs to be somewhere a service tech can reach in winter. I have seen units placed in the summer in spots that turn out to be under four feet of snow and a roof avalanche by January.
What backup power does not solve
Two things worth saying so nobody is disappointed later. A generator does not fix a marginal service. If your panel is already at its limit and the lights dim every time the pump starts on utility power, they will dim on generator power too, and the generator will have a harder time of it than the utility did. Backup power sits on top of your electrical system, it does not repair it. On older cabins the panel work and the generator work often get planned together for that reason.
The other thing is that backup power is equipment, and equipment needs attention. A standby unit exercises itself weekly and still wants an annual service. A portable that has sat in a shed since last winter with old fuel in it is not a plan, it is a hope. Whichever way you go, the useful habit is running it under actual load before the season, not on the night you need it.
Common questions
Will a standby generator start on its own if nobody is at the cabin?
Yes. That is the main reason to choose one for a second home. An automatic transfer switch senses the outage, starts the unit and transfers the load without anybody present, which is what protects the plumbing in a freeze when the place is empty.
Do I need a permit for a generator install?
Yes, for a permanent install and for a transfer switch or inlet at the panel. The work gets inspected, which is the only outside check that the transfer equipment was done correctly, and transfer equipment done incorrectly is the part that hurts people.
Can I add a generator to an old panel?
Sometimes. An interlock kit has to be one that is listed for your specific panel, and a lot of older panels have no listed kit available. In that case a separate transfer switch, or dealing with the panel first, becomes the path. That gets sorted out at the site visit, not over the phone.
Getting a straight answer for your place
The useful version of this conversation happens at your house, looking at your panel, your fuel, your well and your driveway. Out of that you get a backup list, a size, a placement, and a number, and you can decide from there.
Apex Electrical Services covers Pinetop-Lakeside and roughly forty miles around it, including the higher towns where outages last longest. Call (928) 358-2546 or lay out your situation on the contact page and we will work out what you actually need rather than what fits in a brochure.