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Everything on Essential Loads Notes is about Whole-home versus partial backup: what an essential loads panel, a backup loads subpanel and a transfer switch are, how they decide which circuits stay on in an outage, and how to draw up a loads list to take to a licensed electrician, as set out by official bodies and makers' manuals.

Facts on these pages come from published sources, such as makers' documentation, official pages and reference works, and each page links to the ones it used. Every page shows when it was last checked.

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What you read here is general information. Your own equipment's manual comes first, and where safety or the law calls for a qualified tradesperson, use one.