Still no power

[gerisullivan]

I heard the UPS give up the ghost around 4:30 am and woke several times after that, confirmed there was still no power, and went back to sleep. After something like a total of 7-8 hours had passed, I got up to survey the damage and figure out my next steps.

Wales is encased in ice, though it was warm enough that the roads were just damp and not slippery by the time I was on them. The sun came out, ice was raining down from the trees, and I expect the beauty of the whole thing to have passed by the time I return home. I snapped a few pictures; I'll upload them to my computer later and post any that are worth looking at.

The whole town of Wales is without power, and five National Grid trucks are reported to be working in the area. I heard one report that service is expected to be restored this afternoon. Hope so! My primary concern is getting heat back in time to prevent pipes from freezing. This afternoon is fine; the weather report for tonight and tomorrow? Not so much.

I'm down at the Panera in Manchester, researching generators and such. My compliments and thanks to the anonymous poster, presumably from Main Power Connect, for the truly useful links in reply to my first post about the power being out.

Home phone service was working with pulse dial this morning, but then vanished just before I headed south out of the ice. I figure I'll wait until power is restored and report the outage then I'm still without a dial tone.

As I was about to head out of Wales, I called debgeisler who then took a look at Boston.com and told me Wales has plenty of company -- some 350,00 Massachusetts residents are without power, and the numbers quickly climb to 1 million when we add in the rest of New England. From the looks of things, Toad Woods got off easy.

Comments

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

If 2kW is enough to keep the necessary going, then I strongly suggest the Honda EU2000. My local radio club has about 50 of them among the membership, and everyone is happy with them.

If you have a propane tank for some of your appliances, then it can be adapted to using that as a fairly clean fuel that you'll always have available, and it doesn't go stale.
If you don't have the propane, then you can also get larger external fuel tanks so it'll run for long periods of time without refueling.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I've been fighting getting a generator for years (we're in the main city, so while we have outages, we get fixed; and there are lots of neighbors, which complicates some things for long-term outages). More user information is very useful, so thinks from me as well for posting. (Hmmm; if I'm really fighting, then more information *isn't* useful, so.)

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

The EU2000 is quiet enough to be run in an "street car suburb" environment, and two can be paralleled for higher power, while still giving the redundancy of two units. And they're more efficient at higher load percentages, so if you can run with only one unit much of the time, you win.

They're light enough to be carried by a moderately fit person, especially with the external tank (which can feed two gensets).

They're not electric start, which means no battery to move or maintain, but you have to be capable of pulling the cord to start them. And the US versions only put out 120V (probably not an issue for anything you can run on 2 kW).

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Thank you for both the specific product recommendation and for the propane info. Yes, I have 3 propane tanks all together. Two stand-up smaller ones for my stove (and a gas dryer, though the current model is electric), and one big one for the propane heater in the garage, which I turn on once a season to confirm that it works. That system does have some minimal operating temperature thing that it maintains even when I have the thermostat switched off. I don't know if it's a pilot light or something else, but that would be the tank to adapt for use with a generator if I end up going that route at some point in the future.

Given where I live, it would be prudent to have more of a back-up plan than what I've been getting by on so far.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I bet that's Manchester, CT, not Manchester, NH, huh?

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Ah, yup. You think I was going to head north in search of electricity today? It is to laugh.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I girl can *hope*. (I spent the eighties being disappointed everytime someone mentioned Reagan's missle defense program by its nickname.)

[maruad.livejournal.com]

Ice storms like that can be deadly long after the fact. Beware downed powerlines and large point ice things that can hurt when they land on you. I do not know how much of an issue this in in New England but I remember there was a very nasty ice storm in Quebec a few years back.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much clean-up had already been done by the time I drove out this afternoon. In the three-quarters of a mile between here and the post office, there were signs that earlier there had been now fewer than three branches or trees large enough to have blocked the full width of the road. One of the electric trucks had a broken off branch sitting on its roof. Ah, yup, convincing, all right.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm amused. "National Grid" describes their business as "transmission and distribution of electricity and natural gas to customers in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island".

It occurs to me I have no idea if NSP has any sort of useful online site with outage info. (Yes, I do remember that NSP is using the name "Xcel" this week; so what?)

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is to laugh. For small values of "nation," obviously.

The file folder I keep the billing statements in still says "Massachusetts Electric," which was the name of the electric company when I moved here.

I'm with you on the whole NSP thing. Minnegasco, too.

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and in the rather more benign environment of South Carolina, in the extreme case, we'd leave the taps on with a slow stream of water to keep the pipes from freezing. I got my start in plumbing replacing pipes that had been split from freezing.

73, doug

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

That trick only works if you don't need electricity to run the well pump, and only for the pipes connected to the various bits of running water in the house. :-)

The Boiler Guy recommended a gas-powered heater to help keep the basement warm, with the idea that the heat would then rise and help keep pipes in the rest of the house above freezing, too. But then he told me that the two places he knew of to buy gas-powered heaters had both gone bankrupt and were out of business.

In March, 2007, I had pipes freeze enough to stop the heat from working on the first floor of the house, but none of them split, thank Ghu.

You would have been a very handy person to have had around earlier today! Thanks for being here in the electrons.