After exactly 68 hours, the power is back on in my little section of Connecticut

[krispos42]

Kudos to United Illuminating, the out-of-state line workers that are here busting their asses hundreds our thousands of miles away from their loved ones, and Briggs & Stratton, for making the generator that kept life for us and our neighbor vaguely civilized for 3 days.

:party: :patriot: :toast:


<checks National Weather Service website>


Oh, what the fuck is this now? Tropical Storm Katia?

http://www.noaawatch.gov/2011/tc_at12.php

Shit.

[EFerrari]

1. Well, good to see you now, krispos42!

:hi:

Are you guys all right?

[krispos42]

3. Oh yeah, we were good.

If I hadn't been a complete fucking moron and remember to plug the sump pump into the generator after we lost power, we would have been 100% dry and undamaged by Irene.

We were even able to run a line out to the neighbors so they could keep their fridge cold and their laptop working.

By the end of Sunday, I wired the furnace and water heater into the generator, so we even had hot water. Useful to know how to do in case we lose power in the winter.


It's nice to be able to use a real keyboard again!

[steve2470]

2. Welcome back, hope the next storm misses you ! nt

[krispos42]

4. Good to be back!

Now tomorrow is "wash a shitload of laundry" day. Yay....

[muffin1]

30. Oh, I hear you!

I'm petsitting right now, and rain water was basically POURING in under their front door. Used nearly every damn towel in the house to sop it up. Their next door neighbors are out of town, too, and they asked me to check their basement for water the day after. Sure enough, another ten or so towels. Laundry, laundry, laundry.

I really CANNOT go through another hurricane so soon.

Glad things are moving along for you now!

[krispos42]

33. Oooo, that sounds bad.

Water pouring under the door is not good under any circumstances!


A shop-vac is your friend, my friend.

[muffin1]

35. If only I'd had one - and the electricity to use it!

:)

[krispos42]

47. Ah. Yes, a lack of power makes things a bit more difficult.

Maybe RimJob can loan you the hamster he powers FreeperVille with. :D

[sam11111]

5. Blame corporate utilities- they dont spend to bury wire - Europe's nationalized

Utiltes bury wires... In those areas few outages.
Here utilities raid normal overhead money to pocket it as owners profits.
In Europe socialized utilities use overhead money to bury wires.

[slackmaster]

25. Yes, they never have mass power outages in Europe

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2009/02/10/france-weather.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6117880.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/3146136.stm

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/08/28/london.power/

http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/206645-power-outage-shuts-down-cloud-computing-hubs-amazon.htm

http://www.relax.com.sg/relax/news/521426/Power_outage_closes_main_Moscow_airport.html

[Lucinda]

6. WB!

I hope Katia had the grace to realize that she isn't wanted in Connecticut. :)

[krispos42]

15. Yeah, well, the storm track will prove otherwise.

*sigh*

Well, we're all experienced now.


PLUG IN THE DAMN SUMP PUMP!!!

[Lucinda]

31. LOL ~ At least you can add that to your "lessons learned" list!

:P
Hope the rest of hurricane season is very, very uneventful for you!

[krispos42]

34. I'm going to tattoo it on my forehead... backwards.

So I can read it in a mirror.



Well, my brother is getting married in a month, he really doesn't need to worry about this shit!

[Fumesucker]

7. Glad to have you back.. And glad you're OK..

Also glad to hear that you were smart and bought a generator, I bet you burned up some gas heating water with it though.. ;)

:hi:

[krispos42]

17. We're very glad my dad did

This is a reasonably affluent suburb, yet we were the only one in the neighborhood that had one!


And we have oil heat, so all I had to do was hook up the control unit to the generator. That powers the fuel pump and blowers and stuff. Didn't use hardly any power at all!


If we had electric heat or hot water, it would have been a challenge. At the rate we were using gas, we used about one gallon every two and a half hours. We have a 6-gallon gas can, so we filled up the tank every 15 hours or so.

[Fumesucker]

40. January 7, 1973 we had an ice storm that knocked out power for ten days..

And my dad bought a generator the day before at a pawn shop.

Like you, we were the only house in the neighborhood with lights, we also had the old floor heater hooked up and the gas was still working so we had heat.

I learned my lesson then, I've always been prepared to go without power for an extended period.

:hi:

[krispos42]

42. 10 days? Wow.

Ugh. Well, I guess we could have gone that long, as long as we had gasoline.

We have one of those pumps you put in the chuck of a drill, so we could suck the gas out of the cars if need be. 4 cars, that's got to be close to 70 gallons, so that would have been, um, about 175 hours worth of generator time. That's over a week, plus the 24 hours the tank would have held at the beginning of the storm and the 15 hours in the six-gallon gas tank. So that's, um 214 hours of generator time. Divide by 24, that about 9 days worth.


Oy vay, that's a long time to have that generator throbbing on the back porch. It's a bit loud...

[Fumesucker]

49. We usually let the generator go off when we slept..

And we didn't need to run it continually in the daytime anyway.

I think we ended up running it about 8 or 10 hours a day and it was a fairly small unit so the consumption wasn't as bad as you'd think.

Yeah, we drained the gas out of the cars after going through three five gallon cans.

[Waiting For Everyman]

8. Glad you're back and all is well, krispos42!

All of this is turning my thoughts to how to get off the grid - soon.

[krispos42]

18. Solar and wind, solar and wind. Because you know if a terrorist...

...hand blown up a TVA transmission line and put the entire East Coast in the dark for 3 days, we'd be invading somebody this week.


Decentralized power IS national security!

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

27. Ehhh, if a hurricane hit an area dependant on local solar & wind

I think the amount of damaged cells and destroyed wind turbines would be crippling. Much harder to fix/replace than a handful of power lines.

[krispos42]

32. I can't find any reports of damaged wind turbines on Google News...

...and rooftop solar panels should be able to withstand the wind pretty well. We didn't lose a single shingle on the house, and our roof sucks. :D


Those little rooftop turbines, though... yeah, those won't make it.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

37. I was more thinking about debris flying aorund damagine cells.

But really? no wind turbnies damaged?

General Electric VE50 wind gust limit ratings (even considering maximum rotor torque attenuation) are often no higher than about 3 second 70mph sustained wind gusts at the rotor. I've got to imagine any substantial hurricane would destory a windmill. These are maximum ratings... but a good hurricane will have 70mph+ winds especially up high in the air like that.

[krispos42]

45. Oh, that's true

Those debris can move as fast as a pitched baseball. And be much larger. Like, say, a screen door or a mailbox or a poodle.


The windmills, though... I imagine if they feather the blade then the sail area of the whole thing would be much reduced to only the column and the gearbox/generator at the top of the shaft.

A Google search comes up with this article:

http://www.windaction.org/?module=uploads&func=download&fileId=1502



which has in it this chart:

Turbine Model Ve50 (m/s) at Hub Height
1.5xle or 2.3 52.5
1.5sle 55
1.5s, 2.5s, or 2.5xl 59.5
1.5se 70

Table 1. 50-year, 3-sec wind speed gust (Ve50) limits for GE wind turbines at
hub height.
(For site conditions specified in the IEC 61400-1 standard.)



50 m/s is 111 mph, or the very bottom limit for a Cat 3 hurricane. 60 m/s is 133 mph, or the very bottom of a Cat 4. 70 m/s is 155 mph, or the very bottom of a Cat 5. So they look pretty tough.


Of course, that's only a 3-second gust... and terrain features can work against them. If the hills funnel the wind, for example.

:scared:

[lonestarnot]

9. K & R!

Hats off to line workers!

[maddezmom]

10. welcome back

glad you are okay. Have fun doing the laundry. :evilgrin:

[krispos42]

19. It's been a hell of a week, B.

A hell of a week. How is Texas working out for you?

[malaise]

11. Glad your power is back

Katia will be a fish hurricane.

[krispos42]

20. I certainly hope so.

They've already pushed back the start of school until after Labor Day (which, frankly, it probably should have been anyway) but we lost 6 days of school last year due to snow... we don't need this again!

[defendandprotect]

12. K/R -- Just got back myself -- electricity came back 1:30 this morning -- !!

[krispos42]

21. Yay! Hot showers all around?

:D

[kdmorris]

13. Glad your power is back on!

I wouldn't worry too much about TS Katia yet. It's still almost 2 weeks away and is forecast to turn into the open Atlantic. That is not to say that it's certain to turn, but that it's predicted to turn.

[krispos42]

23. Thanks

Time will tell about Katia. It looks a good bit further east than Irene was at this time in her life, so that bodes well. On the other hand, if Irene had hit Providence instead of New York we would have gotten a foot of rain instead of 6 inches!

[kdmorris]

38. That's true.

Here's the latest model map for Katia. That far out, there can be errors by as much as 250 miles. So, yes, it still bears watching. All the light grey lines kind of show multiple runs for the same model, but with different data put in. Sort of like a "what if the high builds back in", "what if the weakness is further to the west", "what would happen if she started moving faster" sort of thing. The colored ones are the models based on the actual data that is being fed into the computer to start the model run. Note: because it is so far out, they do not do as frequent runs (if any) out to see what's going on, so they might not have any hard data to feed into the computer.

If the Republicans have their way, then the planes that fly out to do the recon would have their budgets chopped almost in half, meaning that we would have even less information on these storms then we do now.

[krispos42]

43. That purple trace might catch us.

Neat graph. Thanks!

[Davis_X_Machina]

14. Still out -- 72 hrs @ noontime.

We've been told 'by the end of the week'.

[krispos42]

24. How bad did Maine get hit?

With no internet or cable TV we've been in a news blackout.

[Davis_X_Machina]

51. Western interior was hard-hit.

But down to 8,000 customers now in Cumberland County.

[slackmaster]

16. Kudos to you for being prepared for a foreseeable disaster, and for helping your neighbors

:toast:

[krispos42]

26. It tests your ingenuity.

If it wasn't such a pain in the butt, it would be kinda fun!

[myrna minx]

22. Welcome back. I'm glad you and yours are ok.

:hi:

[krispos42]

28. It's a good thing I moved back here last year

Between my dad's artificial knee being put in, the six blizzards, and the hurricane, they've really needed my help over here!

[GreenPartyVoter]

29. Yay! Now if only Katia would give land a complete miss!

[guitar man]

36. Yay!!

Good to hear you made it ok and kudos to the linemen who got you back on :applause:


My best friend is a IBEW lineman, he's one of those guys that goes out after the storms and hustles to restore power.

If you get a minute later, there's an interview segment featuring him in this BBC radio documentary, his part starts at about the 5:45 mark. He gives some great perspective on what it's like to do that job

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013f96w

(toot my own horn time, I recorded everything you hear in his segment in my studio) :)

[Beacool]

39. Congratulations.

One of my coworkers in NJ won't have power until Sept. 4 if he's lucky.

:(

[krispos42]

48. Yikes. That's a solid week.

Sounds like an excellent time to go on a 4-day cruise.

[Beacool]

50. My coworker got good news this afternoon.

Someone from his house called him to let him know that the power had just gone on. So he got it sooner then expected. Still, he's been out of power since Saturday night.

:-)

[NutmegYankee]

41. I'm still out of power.

I can't type long. I just got the UPS up for a few minutes. CL&P Sucks!

[krispos42]

46. Ugh. Come on by for a hot shower and some ice, if you want.

:-)

[NutmegYankee]

52. I have natural gas for hot water.

But have an electric stove. I can cook on my Coleman stove, but I'm just pissed that CL&P basically left us here in New London County. There are still towns with 100% power loss. They just don't care! I have a better chance of photographing Big Foot than a CL&P truck!

On edit: AT&T got the internet up faster! I am running off battery power for this post. The estimate I got for power was Sunday, Sept 4 at 11:45 PM. And I'm two blocks from an elementary school!

[Shagbark Hickory]

44. Oh. Sorry to hear that.

I know how much fun power outages can be. I guess the fun's over for now.