Storm Readiness and Backup Power in South Florida
KRW Electric Company LLC is a licensed Florida electrical contractor, EC13012832, working from Miami-Dade to Palm Beach.
This page collects the electrical side of storm season in one place — what is worth doing before it, what backup power actually involves here, and what has to be repaired afterwards before the utility can reconnect a house. Tell us about the property and we will tell you which part applies to it.
on the Electrical Side
Before the season: the three things that matter
Storm preparation on the electrical side is short. Does the service and panel have the capacity for what the property runs, and is the equipment in sound condition — an inspection answers both, and a panel upgrade is the usual outcome where it does not. Is there whole-property surge protection at the service, rather than only power strips at the equipment. And is there a plan for an outage that is longer than a few hours. Everything else is housekeeping. Between seasons, off-season electrical work sets out what is worth scheduling before June 1.
Standby generators and transfer switches
A standby generator is a permitted electrical installation, not an appliance delivery. It needs a transfer switch so the generator and the utility can never be connected to the property at the same time, a fuel supply, and a location that satisfies clearance and placement requirements. In Miami-Dade and Broward there is a further step that catches people out: both counties are inside the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone of the Florida Building Code, so the pad and the anchoring are assessed alongside the electrical work. Palm Beach County sits outside that zone and is assessed differently — see Miami-Dade and Broward for what applies where.
Never backfeed a house with a portable generator
The common and genuinely dangerous shortcut is running a portable generator into a wall receptacle to power the house through its own wiring. It pushes voltage back out through the service onto lines that line crews may be working on, and it bypasses the overcurrent protection the property was built with. A transfer switch — the same device a standby installation uses — is the correct answer for a portable set as well, and dedicated circuits are the correct answer for running specific equipment from one.
After the storm: what has to be repaired before power comes back
This is the part most owners have never been told. On a typical property the utility owns the service line and the meter itself, while the mast, the weatherhead and the meter enclosure are the property owner's equipment. If the storm tore the mast off the wall or damaged the enclosure, the utility cannot reconnect the property until a licensed electrician has repaired it, and reporting the outage alone will not move it forward. FPL sets out its side of that boundary on its storm pages. Water that has reached a panel, a breaker that will not stay set, or a burning smell after power returns are all reasons to get an emergency electrician out rather than to keep resetting it.
Commercial and managed properties
For a business the question is usually which loads have to survive an outage rather than whether the whole building does — tenant equipment power, refrigeration, point-of-sale, access control and life safety systems are not equally negotiable. Preventive maintenance on the equipment that has to work is what makes the difference in practice, and property managers and business owners have their own pages for how that is scoped.
Read further
The posts behind the summaries above.
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