Blog posts of '2021' 'August'

Should you invest in a standby generator in the UK? Well, the fact is that we do have power outages in various areas from time to time, and these are likely to increase over the next few years as we switch over to electric cars. The electricity grid at the moment is just about managing, but as more and more people plug in to charge their cars there can well be more failures.

Furthermore, it is possible that electric vehicle owners may allow a third party to charge their cars for them if this provides them with benefits. All well and good, but if a third-party operator is managing a large number of charging points and charges too many vehicles too quickly it is very possible the electricity grid would not be able to respond fast enough. This is just one of the reasons that you might want to buy a new generator in the UK to deal with these power outages.

To some extent, whether or not you want to buy a new generator in the UK is a matter of personal preference. For some people, even suffering from a single blackout is enough to justify buying a generator, but more often it is the likelihood of suffering from blackouts by which the need is determined. If you live in an area where they occur more frequently, or they go on for a long period when they do, then buying a standby generator makes a lot of sense.

When connected to an automatic transfer switch, your standby generator will kick in straight away and so you would only be without power for a matter of some seconds.

Generators are available in many sizes and can be powered by diesel, natural gas or LPG. Generators can also be air-cooled or liquid-cooled. Air-cooled generators are less expensive, but they are also louder than liquid-cooled, and this may not be a good idea if you live in a tight-knit community.

Your generator also needs to be well-maintained. They can run for many hours just like cars and so need to be maintained in the same way. You need to check the engine oil daily, and if it is running non-stop for several days, as happened during the Great Storm of October 1987, the oil needs to be changed after about ten days along with the filter.

Calculating the size of generator that you need for your home needs to be done by a professional, so if you are in the market for one, talk to us at Blades Power Generation.

If you want to buy an automatic transfer switch in the UK, Blades Power Generation is the place to come. We can supply a very wide range of automatic transfer switches ranging from 25 amp to 2,500 amp so there is bound to be the perfect ATS for your requirements.

A transfer switch, either manual or automatic, is a legal requirement in every country when you install a diesel generator in any premises with a mains electricity supply. When the mains supply fails, the transfer switch is used to start the generator to take over where the mains left off. The purpose of an automatic transfer switch is to do the job automatically, which is much quicker than doing it by hand.

Now in some situations, a delay in restoring power to a building may not be very important. If you are at home watching Coronation Street, you may miss a little of it while someone goes to start the generator with a manual switch. However, in a hospital, a delay in restoring power could be a catastrophe and a matter of life and death.

The reason that a transfer switch is required by law is that it will prevent the mains power from coming into contact with the generator which would probably burn out if that happened, but more importantly, when the power is restored from the mains it prevents the generator from back feeding the mains when it has failed, which could endanger the lives of electricity workers trying to restore power.

When you want to buy an automatic transfer switch in the UK you should know that there are two types – those with mains detection and those without.

An automatic transfer switch with mains detection will monitor the mains supply and when it detects a failure will send a signal to the generator to start. When the generator is ready it will send a signal to the ATS informing it of this and the ATS will then switch to the generator.

If the ATS does not have mains detection, the system needs mains detection built into it somewhere else, normally the generator. When the generator detects a mains failure it will send a signal to the ATS telling it to disconnect from the mains and will then startup. When the generator is ready to connect it will send a signal to the ATS telling it to switch over.