About Us

Santa Barbara Generators

Santa Barbara Generators is a licensed electrical contractor working out of a shop on North Nopal Street. We install, service and rent standby power across Santa Barbara County, from 14kW home units in Goleta to megawatt-scale industrial sets in the north county, and we have been doing it here since 2009.

How Long We Have Been Doing This

We started in 2009 as a two-person electrical outfit taking on the generator work nobody else in town wanted, mostly because it involved gas, permits and a manufacturer’s commissioning procedure rather than just conduit. The Thomas Fire and the winters that followed changed the business completely. What had been an occasional job became the thing we do, and the company grew from two people and a van to a full install crew, a service department and a rental fleet.

The Story Behind The Company

The founding argument was about sizing. Too many houses on this coast had generators that could not carry a well pump and an air conditioner at the same time, sold by people who read the square footage off a listing and never opened the panel. We built the business on doing the load calculation properly and quoting from it, even when that meant losing a job to a cheaper number that we knew was wrong. That is still the rule.

The Team

Our installers are licensed electricians and our service technicians are factory trained on the brands we sell, which means warranty work stays in house rather than being handed to a dealer two counties away. Several of the crew came out of marine and agricultural equipment work, which is exactly the right background for diesel sets that live outdoors in salt air and get asked to run hard after months of sitting. Everybody who answers the phone here has been on a truck, so you get a straight answer about whether your panel will take a service-rated switch rather than a promise to check.

The Brands We Work With

We are factory trained and warranty authorised on Generac, Kohler, Cummins and Champion, and we service Onan and older equipment as well. That covers whole house generators from 14kW upward, backup power systems built around a critical-circuit list, commercial generators for restaurants, hotels and medical offices, three-phase industrial generators for agriculture and manufacturing, all-brand generator repair and a rental fleet from 5kW to 500kW. Keeping all of it under one roof is what lets us put a rental on site the same afternoon somebody’s permanent unit fails.

Why We Like The Work

It is one of the few trades where you find out whether you did a good job, because eventually the power goes out and the machine either works or it does not. There is real satisfaction in a phone that stays quiet during a countywide outage while every customer on the service list sits at home with the lights on. We also get the whole county in a week, from a Montecito estate to a pump station outside Lompoc, which is a better Tuesday than most.

If you are weighing up a system for a house, a business or a job site, tell us what has to keep running and we will tell you honestly what that takes. Call: (805) 572-7405