My lady has been off and on the book of face for the last 30 hours or so. She has been reporting on all the horrible, rotten things that have been happening to all of her friends and people of the town.
Did we notice that the electricity was out? Yes, we did.
What did it mean to us? Our movie night was interrupted.
That was it.
We were already running the wood stove, it kept right on running. We use heat powered fans to move the air off the wood stove. Those kept right on running.
I lit the oil lamp and there was plenty of light. She wanted more, so I lit the camp light, and she was able to continue to do her craft work.
We went to bed a little early.
The biggest issue? All the people who were stealing my bandwidth! Dirty thieves.
On a normal day, switching to a hot spot slows things down, but everything continues to function. When everybody is trying to hit the same cell tower to keep up with the book of face and Candy Crush, there is no bandwidth left for me to do actual work.
Last night we had steak, potatoes, onions, and mushrooms. No issues. This morning I had my normal Sunday meal, an omelette. The only difference was that I got home fries instead of toasted homemade bread.
Lunch was normal. Everything was normal except for streaming services being down.
Oh, that included hot showers for everybody. While we have an electric water heater, it isn’t required to take a hot shower. We have a rechargeable, battery-powered shower head. We boiled some water on the stove, added cold water from the taps into a 5 gal bucket. That gave us warm water and a “hot” shower.
Being without electric for a couple of days shouldn’t be an impossible thing.
Relax, read a book, do some hand crafts.
I hope everybody in the New England area is warm, safe and happy.
Comments
8 responses to “What’s a little power, between friend?”
we lost power around 11 pm saturday night. got up at 4am and fired up generator. it runs the whole house. got power back about 630 pm. where I live power going off is a regular thing.. lots of tree huggin liberal hacks( target rich environment)… so I set up a 12k generator to keep the house goin. it can be sunny and 75 with no wind and nary a cloud and BANG, no power… be prepared son, be prepared..we also got 8 inches of snow and freezing rain…
For me, no electric power, no Interwebs, no problem. It’s an unplugged day! Fire up the genset, power up the house, keep on living! I’m an old Boy Scout, “Be Prepared”.
Seriously, what the fuck happened to New Hampshire? The weather was beautiful, in the 50s and sunny for a week. Then it decided to roll back to December and snow on us. We lost power Saturday night too, but we don’t have a wood stove. That’s something that will be fixed when we buy. Right now, we have a terrible gas fireplace that is mostly decorative, but meets the legal requirements for a second heat source. If it gets really bad, I can run an electric space heater off my battery backup inverter for a short period of time. When I buy, a generator will also be on list of must haves.
J, have you not yet heard the saying “if you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute”? Unlike some other parts of the country, wild and crazy variations are the weather norm here.
We’ve had a generator for 20 years now. They are nice, though for a 48 hour outage (which is what it ended up being here in rural New Boston), dealing with gas cans several times a day is a nuisance. I’m beginning to understand why some people splurge on fully automatic whole-house generators.
The snow wasn’t the issue, I think; rather, the problem was freezing rain coating trees with ice and making them break and fall on the wires. Just down the street from us, a big pine tree split in half, clobbering the wire with a trunk a foot in diameter. Tore one wire and ripped the other right off two pole tops. Another half mile down, a pole actually had the top 6 feet broken right off by another falling tree.
I grew up in a house at the end of a stub feeder that would get a tree limb in it every so often. That, and area power outages due to ‘silver thaws’ etc. was enough to have dad install an old water cooled Kohler 2 cylinder gen set that was surplussed from a fire station. Go out in the garage, turn on the fuel line, grab the hand crank sticking out of the end of the engine, and twist it’s tail… Swap over to the gen, and poof! Lights plus power to run the oil fired / hotwater baseboard boiler, and away we went.
Waste heat from the radiator of the genset heated the two car garage /shop quite well. (The exhaust was ported out through an insulated tube to the outside world.)
Tap hot water was a bit of a problem after a day, but ‘white gas’ fueled camp stoves worked just fine for heating water and cooking.
I remember having the mumps one winter, the wind howling outside, thermometer reading -2 F, and all the neighbors lights being out.
We were nice and warm, sitting in front of the ‘heatalator’ equipped fireplace while it was literally blizzard conditions outside.
The next house they built was basically the same. Honda battery start gen set on wheels that mom could easily pull out on to the basement apron, run the pigtail back in and hit the start button. Oil fired furnace as well, plus a free standing fireplace that could easily heat the house all by itself.
Third house they built was ADA spec’d and same thing, except the hotwater heater and the house boiler are natural gas, so no issues with domestic hotwater. And a freestanding natural gas stove/fireplace that can heat the house with no electricity required.
I think the longest that they were without shore power was a five or six day stretch where it was dark for miles around, other than the dairy farmers that had backup gensets. Dad would run the generator part time, then just go to bed and fire it up again in the morning to keep the fridge and freezers cold, and that was about it.
Being without power is a minor inconvenience. As long as water keeps coming from the taps because the water company has big storage tanks or big pump generators. For those on a well it’s a different story. No power means once the pressure tank is empty no water. Having a means to pump water when the grid is down is a very
big deal. An issue that should be addressed now, while it’s still possible to put a plan in place to address the issue.
I find myself somewhere between amused and confused with some of the comments in here. I thought I was the liberal one… 😉
Every conservative knows what it takes to liberate themselves from the confines of extreme weather ?