How Generators Save Lives, Data, and Businesses
No matter how many preventative measures you take to protect your business from unexpected events, some things are simply beyond your control. Among those are power outages caused by weather events, site-specific events, and man-made/natural disasters.
Whether short-term or long-term, a power outage can cause significant damage to your business, including the loss/corruption of critical data, loss/damage to inventory, property damage, and excessive downtime. Above all else, a power outage can put the safety and security of your employees and customers at risk.
The good news? It’s not all bad news.
While you can’t prevent a power outage at your business, you can ensure that your power restores immediately. You do this by using a backup generator.
A backup generator automatically restores power within seconds when it goes out. After utility power returns, the generator shuts off and goes into standby mode, protecting your business from the next outage.
Generating Benefits and Advantages
Rolling the dice and possibly putting business operations, employees, and your customers at risk during a power outage is a gamble most businesses can’t afford. While a backup generator can be a substantial investment, the benefits and advantages of investing in backup power far outweigh the costs of lost revenue, lost data, lost inventory, and lost lives.
According to the Department of Energy, power outages cost U.S. companies $150 billion each year. Having a backup generator can help lower those costs — and yours — by providing businesses of all sizes and industries numerous benefits and advantages. Here are the top five.
1. Maintain Customer Contact — Having a generator ensures contact with your customers throughout a disastrous event. Maintaining contact with customers is an invaluable service. By being prepared, your customers will view you as reliable, dependable, and trustworthy. As a result, your customers will be more inclined to recommend your business to their friends and family. Not only can a backup generator help you keep customers, but it can help you attract new ones and grow your business.
2. Promote Safety and Security — Power outages can endanger your employees, your customers, and your property. Without power, employees can become trapped in or out of buildings that have automated access control systems. Elevators can suddenly come to a halt, holding employees and customers captive in the dark. During an outage, fire alarms, water sprinklers, heat, and air conditioning will not be functional. Lighting and security systems are not operable, making your property more vulnerable to thieves.
3. Protect Data — When computers unexpectedly shut down, critical data stored on hard drives can be corrupted or lost. Losing data means numerous hours of additional work recovering it. This costs time and money and affects your business’s normal operation. Power outages are particularly costly for data centers—an alarming $8,851 per minute or over $12 million for 24 hours of downtime.
4. Safeguard Inventory — A power outage can wipe out or compromise your inventory, mainly if it contains perishable/temperature-controlled items. Most severely affected are restaurants, supermarkets, food processing plants, pharmaceutical companies, medical facilities, and other businesses that heavily rely on uninterrupted power for the storage and preservation of perishables. Just one short-term outage can require a business to throw out millions of dollars of inventory due to damage, spoilage, or contamination.
5. Protect Your Bottom Line — The most obvious benefit of a backup generator is it allows your business to stay open. Downtime from a power outage can cost a significant amount of money in lost productivity, which can be devastating for any business. Although every business is different, the average cost of a power outage is $100,000 for companies that experience only one hour of downtime.
Power outages are happening more often and lasting longer. How much can your business afford to lose when the lights go out?