Backup power, battery storage, solar, and EV charging are one system, not four purchases. Aspen designs and installs all of it under a single Nevada electrical license — so the pieces are sized against each other and nobody points fingers when something fails.
Because the work changed. A decade ago an electrician replaced a panel and moved on; today that same panel has to absorb a car, a heat pump, a battery, and a rooftop array — all landing on service equipment that was sized when the biggest load in the house was an electric range.
Northern Nevada makes this sharper than most places. NV Energy's winter storm outages in the foothills run for days, not hours. Wells and septic pumps stop when the power does. And 250 sunny days a year make solar worth the math here in a way it is not in most of the country. Getting that right is a design problem before it is an installation problem, and it is the reason Aspen treats energy as its own discipline.
A permanently installed generator starts itself within seconds of losing power and runs on natural gas or propane for as long as the fuel holds. It is the only option that carries a whole house through a multi-day winter outage.
Best when outages are long, your well pump matters, or the house cannot go cold.
A battery transfers in milliseconds, so nothing in the house even blinks. It is silent, needs no fuel, and pairs with solar to recharge itself — but it carries selected circuits, not everything, and for hours rather than days.
Best for short, frequent outages, medical equipment, and homes with solar.
Northern Nevada gets roughly 250 sunny days a year, which is why solar pencils out here when it does not elsewhere. Solar alone does not keep the lights on in an outage — the inverter shuts down without the grid unless a battery is present.
Best paired with storage; on its own it is an energy-bill decision, not a backup one.
The largest new load most homes ever add is a Level 2 EV charger. A smart panel manages flexible loads so the charger, the heat pump, and the dryer never peak together — frequently avoiding a service upgrade entirely.
Best when the panel is tight and the quote you got was for a full service upgrade.
This is the question we get asked most, and the honest answer is that they solve different problems. Here is the comparison we walk homeowners through:
| Standby generator | Home battery | |
|---|---|---|
| Transfer time | 10–30 seconds | Milliseconds — nothing blinks |
| Runtime | Days, as long as fuel lasts | Hours, on selected circuits |
| What it carries | Typically the whole house | The circuits you designate |
| Noise | Runs audibly; weekly exercise cycle | Silent |
| Fuel | Natural gas or propane | None — recharges from grid or solar |
| Maintenance | Annual service, oil, filters | Firmware and an annual test |
| Everyday value | None between outages | Can shift usage and pair with solar |
If you are on a well in Verdi or Steamboat and winter outages run long, start with the generator. If you are in Reno or Sparks proper where outages are short and frequent, start with the battery. If the answer is "both," we design them to work together rather than fight over the same transfer equipment.
Generator sizing, battery sizing, and whether you need a service upgrade all fall out of one NEC Article 220 load calculation. You can run the planning version yourself in about two minutes before you talk to anybody.
Enter your square footage and appliance nameplates. You get your calculated load in amps, whether your existing panel has headroom, a recommended service size, and a starting generator size.
Run the calculatorIt depends on how long your outages last. A battery covers minutes-to-hours outages silently and instantly, which is most of what Reno and Sparks see. A standby generator is what carries a house through the multi-day winter events in Verdi, Steamboat, and the foothills, and it is the only choice if you are on a well. Homes that want both get instant transfer from the battery and unlimited runtime from the generator.
Not by itself. Grid-tied inverters are required to shut down when the grid goes down, so a solar array with no battery produces nothing during an outage. Adding storage is what converts solar from a bill-reduction system into a backup system.
Often not. Run our electrical load calculator first — it applies the NEC Article 220 demand factors, which is what decides the question. If the result is tight rather than over, a smart panel that manages flexible loads usually costs less than a service upgrade and solves the same problem.
That is the point. Generators, batteries, solar, and EV charging all terminate at the same service equipment, and the failures we get called out to fix are usually at the seams between contractors. Aspen designs and installs the whole thing under one Nevada electrical license, #0094927.
We look at your panel, your outage history, your utility bills, and what you are planning to add — then tell you what to do first and what can wait. NV License #0094927. Free estimates, $0 diagnostic fee, 100% satisfaction guarantee.
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