I will never take electricity for granted again.
 

Last night at 7:20 pm my electric went out. There was a storm and it didnt come back on til 1pm today. We stayed home because of the dogs,wasnt going to leave them alone in the dark. First the silence was deafening and then it was hot and so boring.

you did not leave your house? But ya shit gets crazy when you lose power.

You leave your lights on at home while you are away for your dogs? LOL.

Anyway, I hear you. Yesterday my Internet was out for probably six hours... was driving me crazy. I did get some good off-line work in though, LOL.

I hear ya.. same thing happened here ... had no power and it was hawt a couple of days ago (~100 F) ... my video player only had an hour and a half worth of juice and lost nearly 5 hours of work.......

Blackouts suck ash!!!

Yes I figure they dont like to be in the dark,I wouldnt. lol

I think dogs have good night vision if I remember right.

I knew that,I guess I humanized them. lol

I leave the lights on and the TV :winkwink:. Sorry to hear about that Tony, I'm glad thinks are fixed.

Shit. we have a saying here in mexico. You have not really lived in mexico until your power is cut off.

When you get the bill, you have 5 days to pay. At the end of day 5 they cut the power.

IF something happens on the weekend, and it only affects a FEW people, they let it ride till monday.

Yeap .. MX and Central America suck big time in that sense........

yeah i always try to think what life was like before electricity.. must of been pretty boring

Mostly reading books by firelight or playing cards and drinking in town.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Try living where hurricanes hit. When we had the hurricanes in Florida a few years back, electric was out for days. Some people didn't have it for weeks if not longer in some cases.

Pick up a 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC Power Inverter for next time.
We use them for video lighting on location shoots:2 cents:

:1orglaugh

I'm sure many people have worse stories than mine, but the longest mine was out was Dec of 2006 for just over 4 days. After 36 hours, I moved my desktop PC to a hotel 30 minutes away that had power and internet. My youngest son, then 18, refused to leave his reptiles. He put them all in plastic storage boxes or aquariums and put them in my family room in front of the fireplace insert. Luckily I have natural gas for my cooktop, the water heater, and the fireplace insert. He and his GF stayed here with all the critters the entire time. Late in the day on day 3, I managed to get a 5600watt gas generator from Sears (truckload came up with some because they'd been all out). The generator ran the fridge in the house (tossed most everything out of it along with all that was in the fridge in the garage), a few lights, and a couple of small electric heaters.

I was back and forth during all that time but we'd closed off parts of the house like my bedroom, etc to try to get the little bit of heat generated more centralized.

Three months later, I had a 35KW, 1800rpm, standby generator installed. It's plumbed into the natural gas line and has an automatic transfer switch. We have it wired to run everything except the a/c and the pump in the pond and the rock water feature.

Longest outage we've had since then was 9 hours late one evening and into the morning. It was interesting watching cars slow down as they drove through the dark neighborhood and saw my lit up landscape and house.

Now when the power goes out we count to 15 and have electricity again.

PK

man. The tornado that hit Holly Springs/ Woodstock came right down my street last night. I haven't had power since 5pm Tuesday and am In a hotel tonight. 2 houses on my block got crushed by pine trees. Hail the size of small golf balls rained down on us like crazy. One tree in my backyard fell and crushed my fence.

When it started I was in my office on the 2nd floor. It hit all of a sudden and by the time I got into the basement the thing had totally fucked us up. I have 13 seconds of HD video that shows the hail raining down on my truck. I'll post it when I get
the chance. Even if i get power tomorrow, my cable and phone lines are lying in my front yard, no telling when I'll get back online.

here's soem pictures from my area:
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/myfox/pa...Y&pageId=9.1.1

That sucks, I once went without electricity for five hours

And THIS is why I have a full house automatic on generator :)

for a cheap solution heres what you do

go to walmart ( or some other store )

buy a deep cycle marine battery ( $100 )

a 1000 watt inverter ( $50 )

and a battery charger ( $ 50 )

you will have enough power for some lights and a computer for hours and hours and you can take it to the beach/camping/rioting/etc

For good bright light, the Coleman (I think it's halogen) camping lights put out a ton. I take mine down the lake all the time and I'm able to read from its light.

That's horrible, Tony. Although, kind of funny how you realize in those situations how important things are that you take for granted.

By the way, dogs in the dark? You don't have... windows?? :)

So shortly after it detects mains power is lost the generator kicks in and a relay switches the source from the street to the generator for most of your internal house wiring? That's a great solution. I guess you chose gas over diesel because of maintenance, rancid diesel issues, etc?

PK, do you have any pics of your setup? I have some fairly important equipment here which is UPS'd, but that's mainly just so every server has time (hopefully) to properly flush everything to disk and then shut down gracefully.

Would be cool, and quite expensive I'm sure, to be the only house with just about everything electric still working :)

A few years ago we lost power during an ice storm for 2 days. Had to stay because we have 2 dogs and a 250 gallon reef tank. All generators were bought out by the time our power went off. We had to use our fireplace and continuously add warm water to the tank to keep from losing everything. We was kind of fun.. played a lot of board games. Although we now own a big-ass generator!! LOL

Was this the first time you were out of electricity???

Yes, it's the same as what I have. It has a 6 second check, i.e. if the power is out for 6 seconds, it starts up. We don't have natural gas here so it's hooked up to my propane tank (330 gallons). Like PK I bypassed the AC - also bypassed the heat. In the summer my basement is VERY cool and the fans will work and in the winter, I have a fireplace, a gas heater and electric floor heaters if needed :)

It checks itself for 15 minutes every Monday morning. Once the power went out while it was checking itself and it wasn't until after about 30 minutes I started questioning why it was still checking itself ;) There's a small LED panel (the size of a light switch) in my basement and if there's a problem, it blinks. There are, I think, 9 different things it can tell me is a problem.

The main transfer switch is before the electrical panel in my house so I can turn off any power I need to in the house w/o it kicking in. The transfer switch is right below the toilet in my guest room and I tell you from experience, it makes QUITE a noise when it kicks in ;)

For everything - installation, all the electrical and gas was $7K. I had a smaller ($5500) quote but I wanted the Briggs and Stratton and it was more expensive. I can't remember the actual specs - I have a small house though.

Here's a picture I took when it was installed:

http://www.onlinebeach.com/generator01.jpg

Best thing I have EVER bought for myself (besides the TiVo :thumbsup )

Peaches, how often do you have blackouts? I'm in a suburban area so I'm probably a bit more lucky, I can only remember a 20 min blackout in the 4 years I've been living here. Plenty of sub-second "blips", but the UPS catches those.

I've also been looking at mini (10') shipping crates, if I've got the gen in the back yard I may as well put the computer room there too! :1orglaugh

I swear to God I had a lot more outages before I put in the generator :disgust All of our electrical wiring (from my house, the street, all the way down the main road, etc) is above ground. And I live in a VERY heavily wooded area. 99% of the time there's a power outage it's because a tree has fallen on a line somewhere. A couple of times someone's driven into a power pole (one was my dog sitter's daughter - she called to apologize for the 5 hours w/o electricity :winkwink:)

On the average it goes out at least once a month. Sometimes for just an hour, but it's been out as long as 30 hours before I got the generator and 12 hours after I got it. I got it mostly because I am the only full time house 3 poles from the street, so if there's a major storm (the people I bought my house from were w/o power for 6 days during an ice storm), then I'm going to be the last house they work on. Since I have a limited supply of gas, not a natural gas line, I turn off what I can when the generator is on.

I think mostly I don't pay attention anymore because when they service it, tell me how many hours it ran, I deduct the 15 minute testing, I find my power was out more than I realized. The only issue I have is the 6 seconds. I wish I could make it longer, but the unit I have has it hardwired at 6 seconds. If I could, I'd change it to 30 seconds, even a few minutes as many times the power just flickers on and off.

I would assume that for computer protection you'd still need the UPS since the generator allows the power to go completely out before turning on.

I lived in a small village in Mexico for awhile, and during the rainy season, we would have blackouts every night. Often the power would go out around 8pm and not come on until 1pm the next day. I kept an extra battery for my laptop so I could still work all night in a blackout.

Sometimes though, the power would stay out for two to three days. I learned really fast to only buy one day's worth of food at a time, because things always went bad in the fridge.

That happened to me last July. Power went out for not too long, only about an hour or so, but whatever knocked the power out blew up the compressor on the AC unit. We didn't have AC again for almost 2 weeks....in July.....in Phoenix.

Probably the worst week and a half of my life.

Don't have any pics. I'll see if I can take some..

It's this generator..

http://www.kohlerpower.com/residenti...&prodnum=52861

with the cover off because it's located in about an 8 x 15 shed next to my garage.

Then there's two electrical panels added to my garage. A transfer switch, a main, and the subpanel (which the generator runs when it's on). There had to be a gas line run from where it comes into my house at the meter to the generator and then wiring run from the generator to the panels. Didn't need a concrete pad poured because the shed is on concrete.

Altogether it was just over 30K. I've always had an APC SmartUPS for my home office, but now it's just to cover until the generator kicks in 15 seconds after power goes out.

PK, thanks for that. First time I've ever heard of the term "residential generator" :)

Sounds all too familiar :1orglaugh

must be hard living in a 3world country! lol JK!

Get Solar, it's often cheaper than your current electric bill, and in many states/cities the electric company will buy back unused power.

Add in a few strong UPS's and you will be saved time and time again. It's neat being in the office, not knowing power has gone out, until the beeping of the UPS's start.

If this were true then the power distribution industry would be collapsing.

You also forgot to mention the high capital costs involved with a solar installation. :)

One thing I would recommend is led flashlights, got one at microcenter it was $10.It takes 3 aaa batteries, its really bright and I left it on all night and it still has some power left. The one thing I dont like about GA is the above ground powerlines in NYC power outages were really rare.
Peaches the generator is very cool, if I wasnt in a townhouse where everything is a vote I would get one. In 6 yrs I want to go to a freestanding house, then I want to get one.

man that sucks glad your ok.