The Benefits Of An Automatic Changeover Switch - Vs - Manual

If you are thinking of buying and installing an electricity generator for your home, you are not alone. With all of the situations that we are facing just now, including the lack of gas from Russia, the race to go green which has resulted in lack of drilling for oil in the North Sea, and the hold that was put on fracking in the Northwest, the possibility of power outage is as great as it has ever been. So, buying a generator for your home makes a lot of sense.

At Blades Power Generation, as our name suggests, we can provide you with the generator for your home or business that you need. The most important thing when buying a generator is to ensure that you have one which will produce enough power for your needs. 

Different Sizes

Generators come in many different sizes as far as power output is concerned, so if you are going to buy one, you need to calculate what size you need. Ideally, you should then invest in a generator which can produce a bit more than you need. There are ways of calculating your requirements yourself, but it is better to let a qualified electrician calculate the figures for you.

You will also need what is known as a changeover switch. This is a legal requirement. When the power goes down you have to change from the mains to your generator, and vice versa when the mains power comes back on. However, you cannot have both mains power and generator on at the same time. This could cause your generator to fail and/or result in injury to engineers working to restore the mains.

So, the changeover switch is used to switch from one to the other. You can have either a manual changeover switch or an automatic changeover switch. If you have a manual switch, it means that when the power goes down you have to go to your generator and fire it up. Then once it is running, you can manually switch from mains to generator. Equally, when the power comes back on you turn off the generator and switch back to the mains. All fine if you happen to be at home. Not so good if you are away for a few days and your freezer goes down and maybe your tropical fish don’t get the warm water they need.

As you might guess, an automatic changeover switch does all this for you, firing up the generator when the mains power goes down and then switching over to it. And of course, the other way around when the power comes back on again. So much easier and simpler.