What a power outage does to an empty Florida home

Most generator advice is written for people who are home when the lights go out. Yours is a different problem. When a Palm Beach County house sits empty for months, an outage is not an evening’s inconvenience — it is a process that starts the hour the power drops and runs, unobserved, until somebody opens the front door. This page explains that process plainly: what stops working, in what order, and why a standby generator is the specific answer to it.

The first day: the house stops being air-conditioned

The moment the grid drops, the air conditioning stops — and in a Palm Beach County summer, the house begins climbing toward outdoor temperature. That alone is not the emergency. The emergency is what the heat carries with it: moisture. Every shower ever taken in that house, every bit of ground moisture under the slab, the humidity in the air itself — air conditioning is what removes it, every day, quietly. Without it, indoor humidity climbs past the level building science tells us to hold.

The refrigerator warms on the same clock. A closed fridge buys hours, not days. Whatever was in it when you left — condiments, the freezer’s contents — is on its way out in the first day or two, and it will still be there, in a warm sealed box, when you return.

The following days: humidity does the slow work

The U.S. EPA’s mold guidance is blunt: wet or damp conditions need to be dried within 24 to 48 hours to keep mold from taking hold, and indoor humidity should be kept below 60% — ideally between 30% and 50%. An occupied house with the AC running holds that range without anyone thinking about it. An empty house with no power holds neither the temperature nor the humidity, in the most humid months of the year, for as long as the outage lasts. Mold does not need a flood. It needs moisture, warmth, and time — and an unpowered Florida house in July offers all three.

The risk is not dramatic. Nobody photographs it. It is a smell when the door opens in November, a patch behind a wardrobe, a remediation estimate that starts at several thousand dollars and climbs. A generator does not prevent mold. It prevents the conditions that let mold start — by keeping the air conditioning, and therefore the dehumidification, running.

Then the week becomes a month

If the outage is a storm outage, the house is not the only thing unattended. The street is unattended too. Nobody is there to notice the water stain on the ceiling, the freezer that has been warm for a week, the security system that died with its battery backup. Weeks pass before the next visit, the next neighbour’s glance, the next property check. By then the damage is not a repair, it is a project.

This is the part of the generator case that has nothing to do with comfort. You are not buying a cold drink during a storm. You are buying the hours and days between the outage and somebody noticing — and making sure that in those hours and days, the house keeps doing the one job that matters: staying dry, cool, and powered.

Meanwhile, the grid keeps having its own problems

None of this rests on the grid being unreliable in the ordinary sense. FPL’s own reliability reporting says 2025 was its strongest reliability year on record, with the average customer seeing about 46 minutes of interruption for the year. That is a genuine achievement — and it is also beside the point. The case for a generator in Palm Beach County does not rest on the forty-six minutes. It rests on the storm event: the hurricane that takes a feeder down for days, the feeder that serves your street and nobody else’s, the restoration queue that puts a seasonal neighbourhood last because nobody is home to report it.

A seasonal home is the last house on the street to be noticed, and the first to be forgotten by a restoration crew working through a list of occupied addresses. That is not a criticism of the utility. It is arithmetic: a dark house with no one in it generates no calls, no complaints, no urgency. The generator is what makes the house self-sufficient in exactly that gap.

Why a portable generator cannot answer this

A portable generator is a machine that needs a person. Somebody has to wheel it out, fuel it, start it, run a cord, and watch it. An empty house has nobody. Four reasons a portable is the wrong answer for a house that sits empty:

• No one to start it. A portable needs a person standing next to it. The house is empty by definition.
• No one to fuel it. A portable runs for hours on a tank, then stops. A storm outage runs for days.
• No automatic transfer. A portable does not know the power has gone out, and cannot switch the house over by itself.
• No safe place to run it. A portable running beside an empty house, with nobody watching it, is a carbon-monoxide and fire risk — and the house’s own alarms are dead with the power anyway.

A standby generator is the opposite of all four: it starts itself, it is plumbed into the gas supply, it switches the house over in seconds, and it is installed to code, outside, on a pad, with a transfer switch. That is why this series is about standby units and nothing else.

What protection costs

A whole-home standby generator in Palm Beach County, installed and permitted, runs $11,000–$17,000 — the range our county cost research keeps returning to. Remote monitoring adds from $54.99 a year for Generac’s Premium tier (Basic is free), and an annual service visit runs about $350–$500 if you buy it one-off. Read the full Palm Beach County cost breakdown for the line items.

Figures last reviewed November 2026 · Sources: EPA mold guidance; FPL reliability reporting; manufacturer monitoring pricing — see “How we get our numbers” on the About page.

What “whole-home” means, in one paragraph

A 22–26 kW air-cooled standby generator, on a concrete pad beside the house, wired through an automatic transfer switch into the electrical panel, and fuelled by the home’s natural gas line or a propane tank. When the grid drops, the transfer switch notices, the generator starts, and the house is back on power in under a minute — air conditioning, refrigerator, security system, well pump if there is one. When the grid returns, it switches back and shuts itself down. You do not need to be there. That is the whole point. The generator sizing guide explains what 22–26 kW actually covers, and what it does not.

What watches the house while you are away

A generator keeps the house powered. Four other things keep it watched. None of them is a substitute for the generator; all of them are cheaper with one in place, because every one of them needs power to work:

• Remote monitoring. The generator’s own app tells you it exercised, it ran, it faulted — from wherever you are. Generac Mobile Link Basic is free; Premium, from $54.99 a year, adds the detail. Kohler’s OnCue Plus is included, with no annual subscription fee.
• Alarms that keep working. A security system and smoke detectors run on mains power with battery backup measured in hours. With a generator, they run for the duration of the outage.
• A property manager or neighbour who checks. A weekly check catches what a sensor cannot. It catches it faster when the house is powered — a warm fridge is obvious; a warm fridge in a dark house is not.
• Your own phone. The monitoring app is the difference between knowing the generator ran and wondering whether it did. That is the subject of the next page in this series.

What to do now

This is the series. This page is the problem. The next three pages are the parts of the answer:

• Remote monitoring — what the app tells you, what it costs, and why the $49.99 figure you may have seen is out of date.
• The snowbird’s checklist — what to do before you leave, what to do when you return, and the service schedule that keeps the unit ready.
• What a generator adds at sale time — what the research says it is worth, and how to make sure a buyer believes it.

Palm Beach Backup Power is an information and matching service — we do not install generators. We do not take a fee from you. Our installer partner pays us when a consultation they receive through us becomes an installed generator. The price you pay is the installer’s price either way.