Five to ten days.

Dealers tell us the buying window after an outage lasts about a week. We put a ruler on it. Google publishes daily search interest by state.1 We pulled “whole house generator” around all three 2024 hurricane landfalls, one state per storm: Texas for Beryl, North Carolina for Helene, Florida for Milton.234

The pattern held every time. Interest peaked one or two days after landfall. Then it collapsed: back to the pre-storm level in five, eight and ten days.5

The wave, by storm

The multiples are the honest gap in this table. Google’s index scores the quietest days as zero, and in Texas and North Carolina every one of the 21 pre-storm days we use as the baseline was a zero. A spike measured against nothing is not a number, so we do not print one. Florida’s pre-storm level was not zero, and its peak ran 14.4 times that level on a 7-day mean.5

Nationally, the same weeks ran about three times the June level: 2.8× for Beryl, 3.5× for Helene, 3.2× for Milton, on a 7-day mean of the US series.5 Then the line fell off a cliff.

“We audited 2,241 U.S. companies, measuring how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. … 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.”

— Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” Harvard Business Review, March 20116

Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were “nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead … as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later.”

— the same study6

A 2007 vendor study, run on InsideSales.com data by James Oldroyd before the HBR work, put the gap between a five-minute and a thirty-minute response at 100 times on contact odds.7 It has no public archival copy, so we cite it as context for the HBR finding, not as evidence of our own.

What the shape of the wave means

Three things are true at once. The demand is huge and immediate. People search from dark driveways within a day or two of landfall.

Second, the first wave breaks within five to ten days. Not to nothing: North Carolina was back at its pre-storm level on day 5 and then spiked again on days 8 and 12, and the chart shows both. But the wave that landfall raises had collapsed within ten days in every state we measured. Texas, at 10 days, was the longest.5

Third, the window opens when your shop is least able to answer. Crews are out. The office phone is ringing. That part is what dealers tell us, not what we measured. The storm does the marketing. Those ten days decide who gets paid for it.

Method and sources

Google Trends daily relative interest for “whole house generator,” one state per storm (Texas, North Carolina, Florida) and the United States, 2024-05-15 to 2024-12-15, pulled 2026-09-26 through the unofficial endpoint and pinned as a CSV in the public article-data repository. Landfall dates are the local calendar dates from the National Hurricane Center’s final reports. Baseline = median of the 21 days ending 3 days before landfall. Peak = the maximum in the 45 days from landfall. “Back to baseline” = the first day on or after the peak at or below 125% of baseline, reported as days from landfall. Multiples are peak over baseline on a trailing 7-day mean, and are undefined where the baseline is zero. National multiples compare each storm’s peak in the 7-day-mean US series with that series’ June 2024 median. Trends values are relative indices scaled 0-100 within each pull, not volumes; a pull on another day can differ by a few points, which is why the pull date is on this page.