About Us

Generators San Francisco

Generators San Francisco is a licensed C-10 electrical contractor working out of a shop on Mission Street. We install whole house standby units, commercial and industrial gensets, we repair and service any make at any hour, and we rent trailer-mounted power to sites and events across the city, the northern Peninsula and the inner East Bay.

How Long We Have Been Doing This

We started in 2009 doing residential electrical work in the city and picked up generators almost by accident, because nobody else wanted the jobs. Standby installs in San Francisco are awkward: tight lots, old panels, gas meters in inconvenient places, setback rules that rule out the obvious pad location, and inspectors who look properly. Fifteen years later that awkwardness is the business. What changed along the way is the demand — storms used to be the whole story, and now it is storms, ageing distribution equipment and Public Safety Power Shutoffs on the hill circuits across the bay.

The Story Behind The Company

The company exists because of a house in the Sunset with a generator that had been installed without a permit, sized off the service rating rather than the load, and connected with a gas line too small to hold pressure under load. It ran beautifully at no load and stumbled the moment the house transferred onto it, and the owner had been told for two years that this was normal. Putting it right cost more than doing it correctly would have in the first place. That is the entire founding argument of this business: the equipment is roughly the same everywhere, and the work around it is the product. That is still how we quote generator installation and repair today: load calculation first, one written number, permit pulled, load test at the end.

The Team

Our electricians are licensed C-10 journeymen and apprentices working under a C-10 contractor’s license, and several came up through utility and industrial work before joining us — which is why nobody here is casual about backfeed, grounding or transfer switch commissioning. They are employees rather than subcontractors, they are factory-trained on the equipment we install, and the person who quotes your job is generally the person who does it. Whoever answers the phone has been on the vans, which is why you get a straight answer about whether a unit will fit down your side yard rather than a promise that it will.

The Brands We Work With

We install and warranty Generac, Kohler, Cummins and Champion generators, and we service those plus Honda, Briggs and Stratton, Onan and most of the older plant still running behind buildings around the bay. Being brand-agnostic is deliberate: Generac has the deepest local parts network, Kohler generators run quieter at the same output, Cummins generator installation makes sense on commercial and liquid-cooled work, and Champion is genuinely fine on a modest house. That covers whole house generators, backup units, commercial generators, industrial gensets, repair and maintenance on any make, and a rental fleet from 20kW to 500kW.

Why We Like The Work

It is a trade where doing the boring part properly is the whole job. Nobody thanks you for a generator that started, because they never noticed the outage — and that is exactly the point. There is also something satisfying about the variety: a Tuesday can start with a load calculation in a Bernal Heights kitchen, move to a load-bank test on a diesel set in South San Francisco, and finish cabling a rental into a film unit down at the piers. Very few electrical trades cover that much ground in a week.

If you have an install, a failing unit or an event coming up, tell us the address and what has to stay on, and we will tell you honestly what it needs. Call: (415) 818-1837