It sits quietly behind the house, monitoring our incoming electrical power and always ready to do its job.

If the power goes off, it waits 20 seconds to see if the interruption is a momentary glitch or a full-fledged outage, then starts up. Ten seconds later, it disconnects the house’s power from American Electric Power and restores power to most of the circuits in our home.

It is a Guardian Plus generator, a fully-automated power backup system, installed earlier this week and ready for any power outage that comes our way. Whenever the power fails, it powers up automatically, pumps out 15000 watts of electricity for our home and runs 126 hours straight on a single tank of liquid propane.

When we bought the home in December, we knew we wanted some kind of back-up power supply. After researching the current crop of generators, we settled on the Guardian, manufacturered by Generac in Wisconsin. Generac also makes industrial generators and used a lot of the technology learned from their commercial installations in their new line of home units.

Of course, by buying a generator, we have insured the power will most likely never go out at our home.

Doesn’t matter. Either way, we win.