Buying guide
A site generator lives a harder life than almost any other installation: moved between locations, run on uneven ground, exposed to dust and weather, and expected to start reliably every morning regardless of how it was treated the day before.
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A starting shortlist, not the only options — every one of these can be sized up or down once we know your exact load.
What follows is how a set for a construction site differs from one going into a building, and what tends to actually matter once work starts.
A site load is dominated by motors — mixers, vibrators, angle grinders, pumps for dewatering, sometimes a small tower crane or hoist — and motors surge hard on starting, often several times their running current for the first moment.
The practical effect: a site with several of these tools, especially if more than one can start together, needs meaningfully more headroom than the sum of their nameplates suggests. Lighting towers and welding sets are steadier loads but still add up once several are running through a night shift.
Sizing is done against your actual load, not a rule of thumb. Send us the list of what has to keep running and we will work out the rating.
A set going into a hospital or a church hall is chosen partly for how little it can be heard. A set going onto a site is chosen for how well it survives being moved, refuelled in the open, and run on ground that is not level.
A skid-mounted or trailer-mounted set with a robust base frame is usually the right call over the acoustic-canopy configuration used for institutional work — the canopy adds cost and weight for a noise concern that matters less on an open site, and can make the unit harder to move as work progresses.
Unlike a standby installation, a site generator does not sit in one place for its working life. Fuel access, a stable and reasonably level base at each new position, and cable runs long enough to reach the actual work all have to be worked out fresh as the site progresses — not just specified once at the start.
A set that is awkward to reposition ends up staying in the wrong place because moving it is a job in itself. Worth weighing at purchase, not after the first time it has to move.
Some sites run a generator for a few hours around specific tasks; others run one for most of a working day, day after day, for months. The second case is closer to continuous duty than standby, and the set — and its maintenance schedule — should be chosen with that in mind rather than assuming light, occasional use.
