Standby Generator Installation and Solar Panel Installation in Lincroft, NJ | 7.3 kW Solar & 22 kW Generac

‹›

Solar Panel Installation, Standby Generator Installation and Standby Generator Service in Lincroft, NJ by Green Sun Energy Services.

▮▮Pause

Lincroft, NJ · Client since December 2022

Alexandra in Lincroft has been a Green Sun Energy Services client since December of 2022. The solar array was commissioned in March 2023 and the standby generator sixteen months later.

20 panels in March 2023

Twenty REC 365-watt panels, 7.3 kW in total, on Snap-N-Rack mounting with a SolarEdge SE6000H HD Wave inverter and an optimizer on every panel. Estimated first-year production is 8,732 kWh and the utility is JCP&L.

A 22 kW machine in July 2024

This is a 2,800 square foot house with two of most things: two furnaces, two gas water heaters, two three-ton air conditioners. Doubling the mechanical systems is what a house does when it is heated and cooled in zones, and it changes the electrical picture more than the floor area suggests.

The calculation comes to 25,096 watts. The two air conditioners are 6,000 of that between them and are the load taken off the top while the generator is running, which leaves 19,096 watts to hold. The machine is a Generac Guardian 22 kW, model 7042-2, delivering 19.5 kW on natural gas, behind a 200-amp service-rated transfer switch with surge protection.

The furnaces are the reason this matters in January rather than July. Both burn gas, and both are useless without electricity — a gas furnace needs power for its blower, its igniter and its controls, and a house with two of them has two blowers that stop at the same moment the lights do.

Summer outages are the hard ones

Winter gets the attention, because a house without heat in February is obviously serious. But air conditioning is the load that decides how a standby installation has to be designed, and summer is when the grid is least reliable.

Two three-ton units drawing together are the heaviest demand this house can present, and they present it in the same weather that brings the thunderstorms down on the lines. A generator sized to carry them outright would be a substantially larger machine, running at a fraction of its capacity for the other fifty weeks of the year, burning more gas to do the same work.

Managing them instead is the better engineering answer, and the household barely notices. The compressors take their turn rather than both starting into a generator that is already loaded; everything else — the refrigerators, the sump pump, the furnaces, the dishwasher, the washer, the garage doors — is never in the queue at all.

The array, of course, does none of this. A grid-tied system shuts down the moment the utility supply fails, and must, so that it cannot energise a line a crew is working on. On the hottest afternoon of the year, with the roof in full sun, it is the generator beside the house doing the work.

It was last serviced on 3 June 2026.