PacB Group // Why, How and Where to Buy a Generator in Durban

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Why, How and Where to Buy a Generator in Durban

There are a number of reasons why one might want to buy a generator and they are all equally relevant, whether one may be located in Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town, or anywhere that is dependent for its supply of electricity on Eskom, the national service provider. The parastatal currently has around twenty operational power stations across the country from which a nationwide reticulation system distributes most of their output to municipalities for resale to a mix of residential and commercial consumers.

To ensure continuity, the power company must ensure that its generating capacity exceeds the load demand by a sufficient margin. Over the past two decades, however, government funding has been insufficient to maintain an infrastructure that, in most cases, has exceeded its anticipated lifespan and is now reliant upon make-do-and-mend measures in the absence of budget for new builds. Where more sustainable energy sources are seen as the future, Eskom’s contingency plans still include measures such as recommissioning a number of its redundant coal-fired plants.

Under the current circumstances, just a single plant failure could exhaust existing reserve margins and this underlines just why it has become so important to buy a generator. For anyone in Durban, or elsewhere in South Africa, who may own a shop or factory for which a continuous supply of electricity is vital in order to remain in business, purchasing one of these machines is likely to be the only viable solution.

Shops and factories apart; imagine the chaos and the potential danger to patients if hospitals were to rely solely on an uninterrupted mains supply, or how such misplaced confidence might affect guests in high-rise hotels if forced to negotiate stairways in darkness when their elevators are unable to function. For institutions such as these, an auxiliary power source is not simply an option; it is a fundamental necessity to ensure health and safety and, at the very least, it should be sufficient to sustain all of the most essential services.

Once you have decided to buy a generator, choosing the right one can be crucial, whether it is destined for a Durban fast-food outlet or a manufacturing plant in Gauteng. Of the factors to be considered, the most important is that its output must be sufficient to meet the maximum load it is required to support at all times. For home use and for small businesses, this means summing the wattage of lighting and appliances and ensuring the model chosen can cope even with the peak consumption during startup, with some capacity to spare.

On a larger scale, a single unit may be insufficient, especially where the requirement is to augment the mains supply and not merely to substitute for it during outages. The calculations now become more crucial and it will be necessary to introduce some form of automated control system to simplify load balancing and to switch between internal and external sources as appropriate.

In such cases, it is important to buy a generator from a specialist with the knowledge and experience to assess a plant’s needs and to tailor a solution to meet them fully. Whether in Durban, Delmas, or Daveyton, PacB Power Solutions is the specialist of choice.