RALCO Electric

RALCO's customers come back again and again to one machine: the standby generator. A 20kW Kohler at somebody's mother's house, a 14kW Kohler, a natural-gas Cummins Onan 30kW with its transfer switch — the Westport company sells, installs and services them under its RALCO Generator brand, alongside the residential, commercial and industrial electrical work its site says it has been doing since 1986. What generator customers describe is a job explained before it starts. In a February 2025 review, a homeowner wrote that information was presented clearly from the outset, that Chris H. was accessible for questions, and that every phase of the installation was explained before the workmen started. A 20kW Kohler install at a customer's mother's house that same month drew a similar note: technicians neat and efficient, questions answered. An October 2025 reviewer said the whole crew, from the installers through the final hookup and testing, was professional. Service visits read the same way — a July 2023 customer watched a technician run tests during scheduled preventative maintenance and got shown where the battery and ground clamp had failed. The straight electrical work shows up too. In a September 2024 review, a crew putting in a larger window hit wiring that had to be rerouted; the homeowner thanked Stacey and Fabio for coming out that morning and having it resolved by 1:00. BuildZoom counts 59 permitted projects, 10 of them in the last three years at a typical value near $11,800, mostly Rhode Island residential standby-generator installs plus commercial fit-outs in Providence, Central Falls and North Kingstown. A 2024 item in an insurance industry magazine named RALCO Electric & Generator in its Electrical – Commercial category for projects under $2 million. Billing is what to nail down first. A Google reviewer in February 2024, who had met the company at a Providence home show and lives in the Cowesset area of Warwick, had not realised they were being charged the electricians' hourly rate for the drive each way. An Angi review from the same month called the invoicing extremely confusing over that same windshield time, and said that after an initial payment the customer's wife kept trying to reach the company about the discrepancies. Two one-star Google reviews, from September 2024 and April 2025, are about the road rather than the work: one reported a company truck tailgating on back roads near Middleboro at 5am, the other a driver yelling from his truck at a Greenville, Rhode Island drive-through. The site names Rene A. Lachapelle Jr. as president and Edward Chaves as vice president of construction, lists factory-certified generator technicians on staff, and cites membership in the Associated Builders & Contractors Rhode Island chapter; its BBB page is an A+ for a corporation started in 1986 with 30 employees. For a whole-home standby generator specified, installed and then maintained by the same outfit in southeastern Massachusetts or Rhode Island, this is a natural call — just get the travel-time policy and the hourly-rate structure in writing before the first truck rolls.