Friday
Evening, November 30th 2012
This is a test of the emergency broadcast system…except that it’s
not a test!
We are in the middle of a complete power failure, neighborhood
wide. Sometime back, I bought a UPS, and hooked the cable modem and router into
it. It’s rated to run a full computer system…including the monitor…for 10-15
minutes. Since I’m using the laptop, and the UPS is only running the modem and
router, it should be good for at least an hour.
We’ll see!
Or hopefully, not. Having the power off is annoying, if for no
other reason than the heater doesn’t work. I recently tested the generator, and
it’s working fine, if it comes to that.
Maybe I should fire it up. That will pretty much guarantee that
the power will come back up as soon as I get it running…
Saturday
Morning, December 1st 2012
The saga continues…we’re still getting power
burps this morning, which is more than a little weird. It’s not snowing; it’s
barely drizzling. It’s windy, but it’s been far windier than this with no
problems. Similarly for the rain. But, this is the worst stream of power
failures since 2005, which was the catalyst for me buying my generator.
One thing for sure…I am sick and goddam tired
or resetting clocks! The major outage yesterday evening was over two hours, but
there have been numerous burps of minutes or seconds since, one just about 20
minutes ago. And, tonight is supposed to be The Big One of this sequence of
three storms, so there may well be power issues tonight.
In a way, this has been a great test
opportunity. I’ve done a lot of general preparation for power outages (a good
thing), but I hadn’t run a full-up test of the system since doing so (a bad
thing). Since the weather conditions weren’t those that I would expect to cause
a power failure, I didn’t do any special preparations, or get the various
pieces “staged”. That made it a true surprise, a “cold” test. So, I’ll describe
what’s happened so far, which may be useful or informative to some of you, and describe
some of my next steps.
For background, when the lights go out up
here it gets dark. Not the wimpy
dim-light condition that city-dwellers refer to as dark, but seriously dark. On a moonless night with
the power off, you literally can’t see your hand in front of your face.
One consequence of this is that I keep a flashlight
next to my recliner, which I use daily. So the flashlight is not an item stuck
in the back of a drawer somewhere, that you can’t find when you need it, and that
won’t work if you can find it. The flashlight always works, and it did last
night.
I was watching the tube when darkness fell,
and just sat for a few minutes, thinking it was a momentary burp. When it
became clear that it was more than a burp, I fired up my computer, both to test
my BCP process for communication, and for something useful to do. The process
worked perfectly. As I mentioned, I have the cable modem and the wireless
router hooked into the UPS. I cleared my email buffer, and then thought about
what to do next.
There are a couple of non-technical
background issues going on at this point in the evening. I’ve been sick all
week to a greater or lesser extent, and last night was unusually bad. Also, my
dog Xena was totally freaked by the
power being out. I’m not sure why. I wasn’t the least bit concerned myself, so
she wasn’t picking anything up from me. However, it turns out that a bunch of
alarms go off in the neighborhood when the power dies. In any case, she wanted
to be outside. The entire rest of the
evening, she was freaked, not responding to her name…not even eating a snack I
gave her. A couple of hours later when I went to bed, she got up next to me,
and she was still shivering with fear. She’s better this morning, but she still
wants out immediately whenever the
power burps. She’s outside now. I was more worried about her than I was about
the power.
I tested the generator recently (less than a
month ago), so I knew it would work, but I didn’t know how much fuel it had in
it, and I didn’t know if I could get to the gas cans with the garage door
closed (With a mid-size SUV, four large motorcycles, and a bunch of crap in a
small 2 car garage, it’s a pretty tight fit). Or how much gas, if any, was in
the cans.
I decided that my first move would be to hook
the inverter up to the car (in the garage) which would give me 300 watts. That
may not sound like much (because it’s not), but having a single 100-watt bulb
lit is remarkably better than sitting
in the dark. I had to dig through the mountain of crap in the back of the car
to find the inverter, but after that, hooking it up and getting some light in
the house was easy.
The location of the light wasn’t ideal,
however. The family room is my waking “hub” in the house, but it’s far from the
garage. I have plenty of extension cords…but most of them are in a cabinet in
the garage…which you can’t open with the car parked in it…and you can’t
conveniently open the garage door without power. You can do it manually, but
the process of disconnecting it, lifting it, and reconnecting it is such a
cosmic pain in the ass that I would only do it in an emergency, which this
clearly wasn’t. Finally, between extension cords and power strips, I was able
to cobble together a cable long enough to bring the inverter power from the
garage, to the light next to my chair in the family room.
The Bridge was no longer in darkness!
I don’t know how long a fully charged car
battery will power a 100-watt light bulb through an inverter. Doing that
calculation is on my action item list. But I now know for certain that running
it for two hours has no discernible impact on the ability to start the car.
Feeling really crummy, I seriously considered
just going to bed, but I decided to see the test through to completion as long
as the power was out. My design configuration for an extended outage (which
still hasn’t been tested) is to have the generator on the back deck just off
the family room, run the power cord inside through a cracked window or door,
and then power up…at least, whatever stuff I have enough power for with a 2000
watt generator, which probably puts out only about 1600-1700 watts at this
altitude. You remember the scene from Apollo 13, where they had to come up with
a power-up sequence for the CM that wouldn’t overload the system? I need to do
that test. I know the generator will run the furnace, the refrigerator, or the
microwave, but not two of them at the same time, never mind anything else. I
may do that test in real time this evening by necessity, or earlier if I feel
better later today.
So I took a small lamp out into the garage
(the inverter has two 110 outlets), and determined not only that I could get to
the two gas cans easily, but that one of them had gas…enough to top off the
generator which, if I remember correctly, is good for 4-6 hours of operation.
Checking out that endurance, and refilling both of those gas cans, is on the
action list.
Just as I finished filling up the generator,
the power came back on. I immediately opened up the garage door, fired up the
car, and positioned it outside in such a way that I could run the power cord
from it to the inverter with the garage door closed. That way, I could run the
car at idle, and get continuous power to the inverter (running the car inside
the attached garage would obviously be a bad idea). I set the cord in the
appropriate position, and closed the garage door. So, if nothing else, I’d have
at least 300 watts essentially indefinitely, if the power crapped out again.
The power burped a few times, but then stayed
on, and I went to bed. I had to get up every hour or so to let Xena out or let
her back in, so I ended up getting at best a few fitful hours of sleep in my
recliner. I had a lot of things I wanted to get done today, but nothing that
can’t wait, so it will. Hopefully the power will stay on through the Big One
tonight. If not, I’ve got everything staged far, far better than I did
yesterday.
Any of you have a recommendation for a UPS
that can deliver 1600 watts for 5-10 minutes? That would be more than enough
time for me to get the generator powered up, and once I get the “Apollo 13”
configuration for my home “Bridge” figured out and set up, I’ll become
reasonably indifferent to power failures, cycling the furnace and refrigerator
on occasionally, as needed for climate and storage control.
A pain in the ass, to be sure, but also an
adventure!
J
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