How much power does a typical Ibizan villa have?

Spanish domestic supplies are contracted in kilowatts and a great many rural and older properties sit in the single-digit range, with larger modern villas contracted higher. That is enough for a household and not necessarily enough for a household plus an event. The figure is on the electricity bill and the villa manager can find it; ask for it as a number rather than an assurance.

When do we actually need a generator?

When the combined load of the event plus the running house exceeds the contracted supply, when the event is somewhere with no usable supply at all, or when a failure would be unacceptable. In practice most gatherings above roughly sixty people with catering, lighting and amplified sound end up hiring power, and many smaller ones hire a small unit purely as insurance for the kitchen.

Are hire generators noisy?

Silenced units are the standard for events and are much quieter than a builder’s set, but they are not silent, and on a quiet hillside a generator seventy metres away is still audible in the gaps between tracks. Ask for the rated sound level at ten metres, site it downwind and behind a mass of building or planting, and budget for a longer cable run rather than a closer machine.

Who is responsible if the power fails mid-event?

Whoever holds the hire contract, which is usually you. Suppliers are responsible for their own equipment working, not for the property supply being adequate, and villa owners are not responsible for an event they did not size. This is why the load calculation belongs to one named person, ideally an event manager, rather than being split across four companies who each assume someone else did it.

Can we just use extension leads from the house?

For a dinner with a small speaker, yes. For anything larger it is the classic failure: several long domestic leads daisy-chained from indoor sockets, sharing circuits with the pool pump and the kitchen, running across paths in the dark. It trips, and it trips at the moment the load peaks, which is exactly when everyone is watching.

Generators and power hire, and why villa events fail on electrics

The most common way a private event on Ibiza goes wrong is not the weather or the neighbours. It is a domestic electricity supply asked to run a kitchen, a sound system, lighting and the pool at once. How to calculate the load, when a generator is genuinely needed, what silent hire costs in practice, and the details that decide it.

The trip goes at ten past eleven. The music stops, the terrace lights stop, and in the kitchen a chef who was plating for sixty is standing in the dark. Someone finds the consumer unit behind a door in the utility room, resets it, and it holds for four minutes and goes again.

Nothing is broken. The house is doing exactly what it was contracted to do. What has happened is that a domestic supply was asked to run an event.

What the house actually has

Spanish properties buy electricity against a contracted capacity measured in kilowatts, and the meter enforces it. Exceed it and the supply cuts, immediately and repeatedly, until the load comes down.

Older rural fincas around Sant Joan and Sant Carles are frequently on modest contracts, because for most of their existence they ran lights, a fridge and a water pump. Newer west-coast villas are contracted higher, but they also come with more built-in load: several air conditioning units, a pool pump, a booster pump, underfloor systems, an outdoor kitchen.

Get the number before anyone quotes anything. It is printed on the electricity bill and the villa manager can read it off in a minute. Everything downstream depends on it.

The arithmetic, roughly

What is running	Rough continuous demand	Notes
The house, mid-August evening	A large share of a domestic supply	Air conditioning is the bulk of it
Pool and booster pumps	Modest, but with a startup surge	Surges trip more than steady loads
Villa sound system	Lower than people expect	Peaks are brief
Event lighting, LED	Low	Old-style fixtures are not
Catering: hot cupboards, fryers, coffee	High and constant	The real culprit, almost always
Marquee lighting and fans	Moderate	Fans on a hot night run continuously

Two observations that hold almost every time. First, catering equipment is the heavy load, not the audio — a couple of hot cupboards and a commercial coffee machine will outdraw a terrace PA comfortably. Second, it is the simultaneity that kills you: everything peaks in the same twenty minutes, when service starts and the music comes up and the sun has just gone and every light switches on.

Ask each supplier for their figure in amps. Add the house. Compare. If the total is anywhere near the contracted capacity, hire power.

A pair of PA speakers on stands facing an empty villa terrace at dusk, cables taped down along the paving. — Taped cable runs are not tidiness. They are the difference between a distribution plan and an accident.

What generator hire on Ibiza involves

A silenced event generator arrives on a trailer or a small lorry, which is the first constraint: it has to physically reach a siting position, and a rural camí with a tight bend and overhanging pines rules out a surprising number of houses. Ask the supplier to look at the access, ideally in person, and expect them to want photographs of the last three hundred metres.

Siting is the second constraint. It needs to be level, on hard ground, clear of anything flammable, downwind if you can manage it, and far enough from the terrace that it does not colour the evening. Distance costs cable. A long run of heavy cable across a garden then needs matting or ramps wherever people walk, and that is a separate line on the quote.

Fuel is the third. Establish whether it is supplied full and billed on return, whether a top-up mid-event is possible, and what the run time is at the expected load. An event that overruns by two hours on a generator sized for the planned finish is a solvable problem only if someone anticipated it.

Finally, ask for a technician or a number. A unit that trips at one in the morning needs someone who knows which breaker to reset, and that person should not be a guest holding a phone torch.

An empty whitewashed event space with bare rigging points in the ceiling and stacked seating against a wall. — A licensed room already has three-phase power and a distribution board. That is a large part of what the hire fee buys.

Sizing, and the temptation to go small

Generators are quoted by capacity and the price steps are not smooth. There is always a cheaper unit one size down, and it will run your event right up until the moment three things start at once.

Size for the peak, not the average, and add headroom for the surge when motors start. A machine loaded lightly is quieter, burns less and lasts the night; a machine at ninety per cent of its rating is loud, thirsty and one coffee machine away from cutting out. The price difference between the two is usually less than the cost of the catering you are protecting.

For events with a marquee, remember that the tent has its own demand — lighting, fans, sometimes heating in October — which the marquee and staging supplier can tell you if asked, and frequently will not volunteer.

The order to do this in

Get the contracted supply figure from the villa.
Book the suppliers and collect their load figures in amps.
Add the house at its August worst.
Decide on the generator and confirm access and siting on a site visit.
Agree cable routes, matting and where the distribution sits, with the sound company and the caterer both in the conversation.
Confirm fuel, run time and a callout number.

The event that goes smoothly is the one where a single person owns this list. The event that stops at eleven is the one where four suppliers each assumed the villa had enough power, and none of them asked.