Standby Generator Installation and Solar Panel Installation in Leonardo, NJ | 32 Panels Eighteen Months After the Generator

Leonardo, NJ · Client since December 2013

Odete in Leonardo has been a Green Sun Energy Services client since December of 2013. The standby generator was commissioned in February 2014 and the solar array eighteen months after that.

A 17 kW machine in February 2014

The machine is a Generac 17 kW, model 6243, delivering 16 kW on natural gas, which is what this house runs on, behind a 200-amp service-rated transfer switch with two power management modules.

The house is 2,672 square feet and its electrical calculation comes to 15,734 watts. Three thousand watts of air conditioning is managed while the generator is running, leaving 12,734 to hold — comfortably inside what the machine delivers, and well above the 13 kW the code calculation sets as a floor.

It was last serviced on 17 February 2026, which is twelve years after it was commissioned and the more useful of the two facts.

32 panels in September 2015

Thirty-two LG 300-watt panels, 9.6 kW in total, on QuickMount rails with an Enphase M250 microinverter behind each one. Estimated first-year production is 10,556 kWh and the utility is JCP&L.

Two problems, in the order they arrived

Most households on this site bought solar first and backup power later. This one went the other way round, and the sequence is worth drawing out because it makes the distinction between the two systems unusually clear.

In 2013 the question was reliability. The electrical service to this house comes in overhead, which is the arrangement most exposed to weather — a limb on the drop, ice on a span, a pole down two streets away — and the answer to that question is a machine that starts on its own when the supply stops. Solar would have been no answer at all: a grid-tied array disconnects the instant the utility fails, and has to, so that it cannot energise a line a crew is working on.

Eighteen months later the question was different. It was not about outages; it was about how much electricity this household buys from the grid across an ordinary year, and whether some of it could be produced on the roof instead. A generator has nothing to say about that either — it burns gas, it runs a few dozen hours a year, and it makes no difference whatsoever to an ordinary bill.

Two questions, eighteen months apart, with no overlap between them and no substitute available in either direction. What the household ended up with was not one system extended but two systems doing entirely separate work — which is what they were both bought for.