Standby Generator and Solar Installation in New Providence, NJ | Winter Backup and 38 Panels

New Providence, NJ · Client since May 2016

Robert and Anne Marie in New Providence have been Green Sun Energy Services clients since May of 2016. They signed for the solar array and the standby generator on the same day; the array was commissioned in July 2016 and the generator three weeks later.

38 panels, 11.97 kW

Thirty-eight LG 315-watt panels, 11.97 kW in total, spread across several roof faces on QuickMount rails, with a SolarEdge SE10000A inverter and a P320 optimizer on every panel. Estimated first-year production is 13,364 kWh and the utility is JCP&L.

The faces are not equal. Two of them run at 95 and 97 percent of what the orientation would ideally give; a third runs at 73. Per-panel optimizers are what make that acceptable — each group performs to its own conditions instead of the whole system being pulled toward the weakest one, which is the arrangement a conventional string inverter would have produced.

A 16 kW machine three weeks later

The generator is a Generac 16 kW in a steel enclosure, model 6462, rated 16 kW on natural gas and on propane alike, behind a 200-amp service-rated transfer switch with two power management modules. The house is 3,000 square feet, its electrical calculation comes to 20,480 watts, and 6,000 watts of air conditioning is managed while the generator runs, leaving 14,480 to carry. It was last serviced on 13 July 2026.

The pipes are the real risk

The heating in this house runs on gas, and it still stops the moment the electricity does. A gas furnace needs power for its blower, its igniter and its controls; without them it is an inert box in the basement with a perfectly good fuel supply arriving at it.

That matters more in January than any other fact on this page. A summer outage is uncomfortable and expensive — the food goes, the house is hot, nobody sleeps well. A winter outage in northern New Jersey is a different category of problem, because the house does not merely become unpleasant. It begins cooling toward the outside temperature, and if the outage runs long enough and the temperature is low enough, the water in the pipes starts to freeze.

Frozen plumbing is the failure that turns a two-day inconvenience into months of repair work. Pipes do not usually burst while frozen; they burst on thawing, often in a wall or a ceiling, and often while the household is still away waiting for the power to come back. It is the one outage consequence that keeps costing money after the lights are on.

Backup power ends that risk entirely, and it does it by keeping something quite small running: a blower motor and a control board. The solar array on the roof, for all its 11.97 kilowatts, contributes nothing — a grid-tied system shuts down when the utility fails, and must, so that it cannot energise a line a crew is working on. On the coldest night of the year the useful machine is the one beside the house.