Storm Damage and Backup Power for Quad Cities Homes
Published
After a storm, stay clear of anything hanging or arcing and report downed wire to the utility. On most homes the utility owns the line to the house and the meter, while the mast, the entrance and the panel are yours to repair before power can be reconnected.
What comes first once the storm passes?
The first pass is a look, not a repair. You are trying to work out whether anything on the house is damaged, whether anything is live where it should not be, and whether the outage is yours or the whole street.
- Stay well back from any wire on the ground or hanging low, and keep children and animals inside. Treat every one of them as live.
- Look at the point where the service attaches to the house. A bent mast, a pulled-loose bracket or conduit torn away from the wall is your repair, not the utility one.
- Report downed wire and a torn-off drop to the utility before you call anyone else.
- Check the basement. If water is anywhere near the panel, do not go down the steps to look at it.
- Note whether the neighbours have power. A street-wide outage is a restoration queue, not a fault at your house.
Never run a cord from a generator into a wall outlet to power the house. It pushes voltage back out onto the utility line, where it can injure the crews working to restore it, and it bypasses every protection in the panel. A generator connects through an inlet and a transfer switch or not at all.
Who repairs what, you or the utility?
The split surprises people, and it is the reason a house can sit dark on a street that has power. On most residential services the utility owns the line up to where it attaches and the meter itself. Everything from the attachment point in is the homeowner, which means the mast, the weatherhead, the entrance conductors, the meter socket and the panel.
In practice that means the utility will not reconnect a drop to a mast that has been pulled over, and they should not have to. An electrician repairs the mast and the entrance, the work is inspected, and only then is the service reconnected. We answer storm calls around the clock and reach most Quad Cities addresses in under an hour, and after a widespread storm the limiting factor is usually the inspection and the utility queue rather than the repair itself. The permit and inspection route differs from city to city, so check the page for your city for who to file with.
What storm-damaged equipment can be reused?
Water is the clearest line. A panel that has been submerged, or has had rain run down inside it through a damaged mast, gets replaced. Breakers and busbars corrode internally once they have been wet, the damage is not visible with the cover off, and nobody can certify one as sound afterwards. The same applies to receptacles, switches and hard-wired equipment that went under: they are cheap to replace and impossible to test back to a clean bill of health.
Heat and surge damage are less obvious. A nearby strike can leave a panel looking untouched while the electronics in the furnace, the well pump controller and the garage opener are all dead. We sort out what failed, what is merely tripped, and what is damaged in a way that will only show up in a month.
Which backup option fits the house?
There are two honest answers to a long outage, and the right one depends on how long you can sit in the dark and what has to keep running while you are.
| Consideration | Portable set with an inlet | Permanently installed standby |
|---|---|---|
| Starting up | You go outside, start it and switch the transfer switch over by hand | It senses the outage, starts itself and transfers within seconds |
| Fuel | Gasoline you have to store safely and go out to refill during the outage | Natural gas or propane, piped to the set by a gas fitter, so nobody refuels anything |
| What it runs | A short list of circuits picked in advance: furnace, sump, refrigerator, a few outlets | Most of the house, with the size set from a load list rather than a guess |
| What has to be installed | An exterior inlet, a transfer switch and a feed back to the panel | A pad, a transfer switch, a feeder, and a gas line run by others |
| Permit and inspection | Yes. The inlet and the transfer switch are permitted, inspected work | Yes. The set, the transfer switch and the feeder are permitted, inspected work |
If you already own a portable, the useful upgrade is the inlet and transfer switch, which turns a machine that can only run cords into one that feeds the furnace and the sump pump. If an outage has already cost you a basement, a standby set that starts itself at three in the morning is the one that earns its keep.
Where does surge protection fit in?
Backup power and surge protection solve different problems. A generator handles the power being gone. Surge protection handles the power coming back badly, which is the more common way a storm costs you money. Most of what a whole-house device stops is not lightning at all: it is the switching transients as the utility restores a circuit, and the smaller spikes your own well pump and air conditioner produce every day.
A device at the panel takes the large peak out. Plug-in protection at the equipment you care about catches what gets past it. Neither one survives a direct strike, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Both together are what keeps a furnace control board alive through a bad week in June, and they are quick to fit while a panel is already open.