Wife out shopping......

Zeldman

Zeldman

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Jun 13, 2014
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high desert NM
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Billy
I just received a text from my wife. She is in Walmart doing our weekly shopping.

Seems the power went out. She was in the checkout line when it happened, putting her items on the belt to be scanned by the cashier. (no self checkout for us)

Follow up text about 20 minutes later is that they are evacuating the building. Might not be a quick fix.

No big problem for us as Safeway and Albertsons and a couple independent grocery stores are close by.

But some folks off the reservation have to drive 50 or more miles to shop.

edit: Good news..!!!

Life has returned to normal..!!!

The power is back on.!!

We will have our great value savings today after all....
 
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Last summer I was sitting here at my desk and the power went out. We all were looking around at eachother going "What just happened?"

Then I heard that a transformer that provided power to my entire building had caught fire. Packed up the laptop, went to work from home. Didn't see that getting fixed anytime soon.

Wouldn't surprise me if something like that happened.
 
We lose power at my office at least once every couple of weeks (gotta love life in the country), it was off for 24 minutes this morning in fact. Typically it doesn't go out for too long though, unless it's a hurricane or something.
 
The power here at the office is pretty reliable. At my house I think it goes off at least weekly, though usually for only a few seconds.

At my previous office, the entire campus lost power and we were all ultimately sent home. Apparently a despondent squirrel decided to end it all and jumped into the substation, ending the workday for about 600 people.
 
I was curious and I just checked. In the last 5 weeks, we've lost power on 9 days. One of those was for more than an hour, but most were either a few minutes or just a hiccup.

2019/05/11 13:24:00 PM Utility failed.
2019/05/11 13:51:53 PM Utility failed.
2019/05/12 00:27:05 AM Utility failed.
2019/05/14 18:00:40 PM Utility failed.
2019/05/16 10:20:43 AM Utility failed.
2019/05/20 18:07:35 PM Utility failed.
2019/05/21 12:04:56 PM Utility failed.
2019/05/21 14:51:12 PM Utility failed.
2019/05/28 14:56:54 PM Utility failed.
2019/06/01 04:15:01 AM Utility failed.
2019/06/05 07:19:33 AM Utility failed.
2019/06/05 08:02:23 AM Utility failed.
 
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So what you’re all saying is you need me to put you in touch with a dealer about commercial gensets? I prefer if you go natural gas.
 
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Challenged said:
We lose power at my office at least once every couple of weeks (gotta love life in the country), it was off for 24 minutes this morning in fact. Typically it doesn't go out for too long though, unless it's a hurricane or something.
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Buy a generator. You'll never have another power failure.

Rich
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
So what you’re all saying is you need me to put you in touch with a dealer about commercial gensets? I prefer if you go natural gas.
Click to expand...

Actually I am looking into solar power. With an average of 412* sunny days a year in my area, solar makes sense.

I don't want to go off grid, I just want back up power for a few lamps and the Tv. Maybe the swamp cooler. The last time I had a major power outage at the house it lasted a little over 8 hours. It would have been nice to have a fan, a lamp or two and the Tv working. Amazingly everything in the freezers didn't even start to get soft except for a few spots on a couple items.





*Ok, not really 412 days of sunshine, but it can sure feel like it at times...
 
So, I have this treadmill under my desk that I use occasionally. Pretty cheap and cheezy - I got it at a garage sale - it's really too fast to use for longer periods at work. Someday, I will fix that. But, one morning, I'm chugging along working on the computer when - whomp - power goes out, belt stops instantly, I crash into the desk. Takes a couple seconds to get my balance back, then, yea, as I'm standing there, the power comes back on.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
So, I have this treadmill under my desk that I use occasionally. Pretty cheap and cheezy - I got it at a garage sale - it's really too fast to use for longer periods at work. Someday, I will fix that. But, one morning, I'm chugging along working on the computer when - whomp - power goes out, belt stops instantly, I crash into the desk. Takes a couple seconds to get my balance back, then, yea, as I'm standing there, the power comes back on.
Click to expand...

And just like that, you were airborne! I knew that the treadmill takeoff was real!!!
 
Our city has a smart grid system, I can only recall one brief 5-6mim power outage in the last five years. The power just never goes out.

https://epb.com/home-store/power/smart-grid

A nice benefit to the system is having 1G up/down fiber right to the house. They're even offering 10G service in some areas.
 
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My first job (1969) was as a checker in an Alpha Beta supermarket in La Habra CA. Our mechanical NCR cash registers came with a hand crank kept in a drawer under the register. When the power went out, we just took out the crank, put it in the little keyhole in the side of the machine, and kept going with the customer's order.

:D
 
Zeldman said:
Actually I am looking into solar power. With an average of 412* sunny days a year in my area, solar makes sense.

I don't want to go off grid, I just want back up power for a few lamps and the Tv. Maybe the swamp cooler. The last time I had a major power outage at the house it lasted a little over 8 hours. It would have been nice to have a fan, a lamp or two and the Tv working. Amazingly everything in the freezers didn't even start to get soft except for a few spots on a couple items.





*Ok, not really 412 days of sunshine, but it can sure feel like it at times...
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I have solar. But if power goes out so does the solar. To allow it to feed back into grid when you are not using as much there is a relay to prevent back feeding the main line so no linesman get shocked.
It’s nice I get checks from power company two quarters of the year. But without the incentives when I put it up- it would have been cost prohibitive.
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
I prefer if you go natural gas.
Click to expand...

We have a combination of gensets at work, some natural gas hard piped, and some diesel. The NG ones are nice because we don't have to be concerned with a fuel source, but I've come to prefer the diesels. The NG ones have a lot of the typical gas engine issues, plugs, wires, etc. The diesels just keep chugging so long as I keep the tanks filled.

Not to mention, my mentality about a backup generator is that it is there for when the outside world ceases to exist. In a major disaster, power and NG service could be cut off, but my big diesel tank will still be there, and it will last for at least a week or more.

This comes from personal experience surviving Katrina. If it wasn't within our property line, it didn't exist, and it was of no use to us. No food, gas, water, power, comm, or outside assistance for several weeks. Fortunately we were good country folk, we had more than enough supplies to survive quite well. The only thing we missed was A/C. It was damn warm in the weeks after Katrina.
 
midwestpa24 said:
We have a combination of gensets at work, some natural gas hard piped, and some diesel. The NG ones are nice because we don't have to be concerned with a fuel source, but I've come to prefer the diesels. The NG ones have a lot of the typical gas engine issues, plugs, wires, etc. The diesels just keep chugging so long as I keep the tanks filled.

Not to mention, my mentality about a backup generator is that it is there for when the outside world ceases to exist. In a major disaster, power and NG service could be cut off, but my big diesel tank will still be there, and it will last for at least a week or more.

This comes from personal experience surviving Katrina. If it wasn't within our property line, it didn't exist, and it was of no use to us. No food, gas, water, power, comm, or outside assistance for several weeks. Fortunately we were good country folk, we had more than enough supplies to survive quite well. The only thing we missed was A/C. It was damn warm in the weeks after Katrina.
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Backup gens have been primarily diesel for a long time due to what you say. Plus my understanding is they start up faster and get to load faster. I am on the gas side of the business (for now) so just playing my bias. :) The majority of our product is going to prime power and not to standby. But the gas gensets are progressing nicely in technology to run more like diesel in their startup capabilities.
 
I put in a surplus MEP803 diesel military genset at the house. One reason is that if push really comes to shove I've got 15K gallons of Jet-A just over the hill that it will run fine on...not to mention we're in farm country (neighbors with massive diesel tanks).

Jim
 
Aren't you all supposed to be shopping out in Nature? Or have you gone soft after moving south? LOL
 
100% telecommuter since 2004 here. Power losses in the past couple of years have been limited to one during an ice storm, and one when our breaker panel caught fire. This part of town has all underground cable in the neighborhoods, and power has been incredibly reliable over the years.
 
DaleB said:
100% telecommuter since 2004 here. Power losses in the past couple of years have been limited to one during an ice storm, and one when our breaker panel caught fire. This part of town has all underground cable in the neighborhoods, and power has been incredibly reliable over the years.
Click to expand...
I've been living on the slightly breezy Oregon coast now for 3 years(A slight breeze is when it gets above 40MPH) and we have nothing underground. I think they're have been 2 or so outages, there have been more caused by me turning off the entire panel when I wanted to work on something in the panel... I bought a cheap gas generator just in case, and a proper inlet box and interlock for the breaker box, which I hope to finish installing before the next power outage. The generator is only 3KW but I sized everything else for a 10KW system.
 
I suppose wife out shopping is better than being out wife shopping.
 
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