How to Prepare Your Marin Home for PSPS Season

A Public Safety Power Shutoff is when PG&E proactively cuts power during high fire-risk weather — strong winds and dry conditions — to reduce the chance that electrical equipment sparks a wildfire. They’re weather-driven, so timing and duration vary: some last only hours, but multi-day shutoffs happen, especially in and near higher-risk areas. PG&E aims to give advance notice, which is why signing up for their alerts matters. Planning for a shutoff of a day or more is prudent if you’re in a frequently affected part of Marin.

Your exposure depends heavily on location — homes in and near the wildland-urban interface and on certain circuits see shutoffs far more often than others. Check your address’s outage history and sign up for PG&E’s PSPS notifications, which are tied to your address and circuit. If you’ve experienced repeated shutoffs in recent years, assume you’re in a higher-risk zone and plan accordingly. Knowing whether you’re facing occasional short outages or repeated multi-day events is what determines how much backup power is worth.

It depends on your exposure and what you can’t do without. For frequent, multi-day shutoffs and critical loads — a well pump, medical equipment, a home business — a standby generator’s hands-off whole-home coverage is often worth it. For occasional outages and a short essentials list, a portable generator with a transfer switch is far cheaper. A battery, especially paired with solar, runs silently and suits shorter outages. Many homeowners with heavy exposure combine a battery for quiet hours with a generator for long stretches.

Yes — timing is the whole point. Backup power, especially a standby generator or a transfer-switch setup, isn’t a same-day purchase: it involves sizing, permitting, sometimes gas work, and installation, all of which take time. Deciding in the dry months means you’re actually protected when the first shutoff warning arrives, rather than joining the rush when everyone else is scrambling. Even a portable-plus-transfer-switch solution needs the transfer switch installed ahead of time to be used safely, so plan early.

Yes, safely, if it’s connected properly — which means through a transfer switch or interlock installed by a licensed electrician, never plugged into a wall outlet. Backfeeding a generator into an outlet energizes your home’s wiring and can send power back onto the lines, endangering utility crews, and it can damage your equipment. Also run portables outdoors only, well away from windows, because of carbon monoxide. Set up correctly ahead of the season, a portable is a solid way to keep essentials running through a shutoff.

Plan for cold before the power goes. Keep the refrigerator and freezer closed as much as possible — a full freezer holds temperature far longer than an empty one — and have coolers and ice ready to move essentials into for a prolonged outage. For refrigerated medication, know its temperature requirements and have a cooler plan, and talk to your pharmacist or doctor about backup options ahead of the season. If you rely on medication that must stay cold, that need alone may justify investing in backup power.