Keep Above
Buy or hire the generator
A generator is bought for readiness or hired for the occasion, and the two shapes cost very differently. This page counts owning — price, upkeep, eventual sale — against hiring per occasion, over the same years and uses a year. Each way lands on a cost per year and per use; the break-even uses a year is stated as a fact, and no winner is declared.
Not counted while this is $0
After 5 years
Delivery, membership, deposits — not counted while $0
Put in what buying one would cost, and what one hire would cost. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Owning | Hiring | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid up front | — | — |
| Value lost | — | — |
| Hire fees | — | — |
| Other costs | — | — |
| Total over 5 years | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a use | — | — |
What does a generator cost in a year it never runs?
A generator is usually bought against something that may not happen — a cut, a storm, a site with no power at the other end of it. That puts its value in being there rather than in hours run, and it is the one case on this page where the uses-a-year field understates what owning is for: a quiet year reads as no uses at all.
The idle cost is real and mostly about fuel and starting, since fuel ages in a tank and a unit left standing tends to want a service before it runs again. The page cannot count readiness as a use, because it is not one; what it can show is what a year of having it there comes to, once the occasions you'd genuinely expect are in.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
Owning and hiring separate over years rather than weeks, so the useful question is what a balance would look like that far out — which budgeting apps forecast your balance, and how far ahead.
About this calculator
What counts as upkeep for a generator?
What a year of ownership would take whether or not it runs — a service, oil, keeping fuel fresh or drained, and storage. One yearly figure in the box; $0 means it isn't counted.
What would one hire include here?
What one occasion would cost door to door — the hire rate for the period you'd actually take it, delivery if it's heavy enough to need it, and fuel where the depot charges for it. Yearly costs belong in the extras box; refundable bonds stay out.
What is the crossing point?
The number of occasions a year at which the two totals would land on the same figure, over the years you set. It marks a position in the arithmetic and nothing else, and on a generator bought for readiness it can sit well above the uses an ordinary year would ever produce. Where owning nets to nothing, or hiring's yearly extras alone pass owning's total, no such number exists and the page says which.
What goes in the uses-a-year box for a standby generator?
The number of occasions you'd genuinely expect to run it, which for standby use might be none in an ordinary year and several in a bad one. A year entered at zero uses gives hiring nothing to cost and leaves owning carrying its price and upkeep alone, which is the arithmetic working correctly rather than a fault. The cost-a-year figure on the owning side is then the figure that describes what readiness comes to.