Why I'm Finally Installing Generators (The Math I Wish I'd Done Sooner)

I've had a whole-property standby generator at one of my cabins for a while now — the kind that runs on propane and kicks on automatically the moment the power drops. My other properties don't have one. I've been putting it off, mostly because a proper install runs into five figures, and that's a hard number to justify when nothing's currently on fire.

Then this year gave me two very different data points, and they changed my mind.

The Property That Didn't Notice

During a stretch of severe storms that knocked out power across the region, the cabin with the standby generator didn't skip a beat. Guests never lost lights, never lost the fridge, never lost internet, never even necessarily knew the power around them had gone out at all. The generator kicked on automatically and the stay continued exactly as booked.

That's the boring, unremarkable outcome you want from a generator. No story, no drama, no refund conversation, no scrambling. Just a normal stay at a property that happened to have backup power when it mattered.

The Property That Did

Around the same time, my housekeeper — who also owns and manages her own cabin — lost power for several days straight. With no backup power in place, she had no choice but to cancel the reservations that fell during that stretch. That cost her several thousand dollars in lost revenue from a handful of canceled bookings, on top of the stress of managing cancellations, refunds, and disappointed guests during an already difficult week.

Multiply that out. A multi-day outage during a high-demand stretch isn't a rare, once-a-decade event in a lot of rural markets — it's something that can realistically happen more than once a year, especially with severe weather becoming more frequent. Every time it does, a property without backup power is looking at a similar hit: canceled stays, refunded nights, and the scramble that comes with both.

Doing the Actual Math

A generator installation running into five figures sounds like a lot until you set it against what even one bad multi-day outage costs in lost bookings. My housekeeper's several-thousand-dollar hit from a single outage isn't a hypothetical — it's a real number from this year. If a property loses power for a few days during a peak stretch even once or twice a year, the lost revenue alone can approach or exceed the cost of the generator within just a couple of seasons.

That's before accounting for the other side of the ledger: the reviews you don't get because guests left frustrated, the refunds you issue trying to make things right, and the repeat bookings that never happen because a guest's one vacation of the year got disrupted. A generator doesn't just protect against a bad week of cancellations — it protects against all of the downstream costs that come with a bad guest experience during an outage.

Once I actually ran the numbers this way — comparing the install cost against realistic annual outage risk rather than treating it as a nice-to-have — the payback period looked a lot shorter than I'd assumed when I kept putting it off.

The Cost I Wasn't Counting

There's also a cost that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet at all: the stress.

A few years ago, a severe ice storm knocked out power to a couple of my cabins for about a week, right during a stretch when wind chills were sitting around negative 20 degrees. That week is still one of the most stressful stretches I've had as a host. Without power, I was scrambling to keep the hot tubs from freezing solid and the pipes warm enough to avoid a full winterization and the burst-pipe damage that comes with it — all while temperatures outside made every one of those problems worse by the hour. On top of the property concerns, there were guests genuinely stuck out there in that kind of cold with no power, which is its own kind of dread entirely. You're not just worried about equipment at that point — you're worried about people.

I've had power go out at my properties in other, less extreme situations too, and there's a specific kind of dread that comes with any winter outage — worrying about pipes freezing, worrying about guests who are cold and unhappy, worrying about whether you're going to get a call in the middle of the night. But that ice storm week was the clearest example of just how bad it can get when an outage lines up with genuinely dangerous cold. That stress is real, and it's recurring. Every storm forecast becomes a small source of anxiety at any property without backup power, in a way it simply isn't at the one that has it.

I don't have a dollar figure for that, but after living through both situations — a week fighting frozen pipes and stranded guests at negative 20 wind chills, and a property that handles outages without me even knowing they happened — I can say the peace of mind alone is worth a meaningful chunk of the investment on its own.

What I'm Doing Now

I'm moving forward with getting standby generators installed at my other properties. The upfront cost is real, and it's not a small check to write. But between the lost-revenue math, the guest experience protection, and the stress it removes from my own life every time a storm rolls through, it's an investment that pays for itself faster than I expected — and keeps paying every season after that.

If you're a host sitting on the fence about this the way I was, I'd encourage you to actually run the numbers on what one bad outage costs you, rather than treating the generator as an optional upgrade. For a lot of rural properties, it's closer to essential infrastructure than a luxury.

Greg Myers is the founder of CabinHost Consulting and operator of Red Oak Retreats in Hocking Hills, Ohio. He works one-on-one with rural vacation rental hosts to improve their listings, pricing, guest experience, and operations.