PacB Group // Manufacture, Supply, and Maintenance of Generators in Pretoria

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Manufacture, Supply, and Maintenance of Generators in Pretoria

Together with the neighbouring city of Johannesburg, South Africa’s administrative capital accounts for the bulk of the industrial and commercial activity in the country. In addition, even though Gauteng is the smallest of the nine provinces, it is home to almost a quarter of the nation’s population. As a consequence, electricity consumption is also the highest nationwide, prompting a huge demand for generators, especially in the industrial and commercial areas of cities, such as Pretoria.

In these sectors, they are essential either to provide additional power, when production demands exceed Eskom’s capacity to supply via the national network, or to serve as an alternative emergency supply in order to eliminate or minimise downtime and subsequent production losses in the event of mains failures.

Apart from the need for a secondary power source in factories, where productivity is generally the main concern, and in other places, such as hospitals and hotels, where concerns regarding health and safety are an added issue, there are other equally valid explanations for the large number of electrical generators now in use in Pretoria and other South African towns and cities.

One that is perhaps the most obvious, and which has become a regular feature in the lives of most of the country’s citizens, is the national service provider’s policy of load shedding, and the programme of rolling blackouts that it entails. The result has been a rapid escalation in the number private homes that are now equipped with some form of backup power supply.

Some may have gone as far as to install an extensive array of solar panels, while others may have simply installed a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide a temporary supply to keep PCs running without the risk of data corruption or loss. In addition, a significant number of homeowners now rely on their own generators to combat outages in the suburbs of Pretoria and in residential areas nationwide.

To meet the growing need for emergency or auxiliary power of both the public and private sectors requires more than simply increasing the number of retailers, especially since it is clearly essential that the expertise of these additional sales outlets should extend to include electrical power generation. Nevertheless, many of the smaller hardware stores have been quick to recognise this opportunity to benefit from an additional revenue stream, often importing cheap and potentially unreliable products from manufacturers in the Far East. In practice, however, even industrial and commercial buyers will often need some expert advice. Also, it is likely that many of the factories in Pretoria will require a purpose-built generator set to handle their unique applications.

Although a bespoke installation is most unlikely to prove necessary for residential purposes, residential users have other, equally important needs. Typically, the average homeowner will require some expert advice regarding the most suitable product choice, and possibly some assistance with installing the chosen unit. Also, the assurance of an established backup service, in case there may be a need for spares, repairs, or maintenance is likely to be equally important. That said, most domestic uses are not crucial, and so, while it may not be too important for homeowners to have a system that can switch automatically from mains power to a generator, at industrial and commercial sites in Pretoria, installing an automatic transfer switch (ATS) to avoid downtime and lost production can often be essential. Once again, this is a task that needs to be undertaken by a specialist.

In addition to remote mining sites, which must often meet all of their needs by producing their own power, there are also situations that call for mobile power sources. For example, construction firms often require electricity at sites where there is no existing power infrastructure. In such situations, in addition to satisfying all of the above requirements, PacB Group also supplies trailer-mounted generators for Pretoria users.