I gather Scott, too, had his power go off at around 8 AM Monday morning. I got up when the power died just in time to hear why they say a tornado sounds like freight train. 70MPH winds sound like a freight train.
I only lost a bunch of tree branches, mostly because my weaker trees were felled last year. We lost a good sized oak next door.
To show my "good planning" although not even rain was forecast, I had let the car gas tank be dry. I've been getting a low fuel light since the previous Wednesday. I trusted that the fuel gauge in the wagon is way pessimistic. I've never put in more than 10 gallons at a fill up and it hold a lot more.
So we're leaving the driveway Monday morning on fumes, and I warned that we may end up pushing it, heading north to find a gas station with power which we heard was on the line just short of Wisconsin. What I didn't count on was all of the backups due to traffic lights being out. In the end it took about an hour until I pulled up to the first pump that worked, and added 11 gallons.
I watched a kid filling up about 6 big gas cans.
There are trees and power lines down everywhere. A 6 foot diameter 100 year old tree downtown broke into chunks. The village told us to conserve water because per SNAFU they didn't have power for the pumps.
I got online at 2PM using WiFi in Kenosha to get into work and tell the boss that I was offline.
I recalled my previous hours of research into buying a generator where it occurred to me that there's no point in having a gasoline generator if you can't get gasoline. I had a tri-fuel generator on my wish list. My co-worker just reminded me of the east coast blackout where there was no power anywhere from Detroit to the Atlantic.
It took a while until we realized that this one was going to be long one. Once I had hashed out in my head that I really did need to buy a generator, we drove south late Monday night, intending to go as far as Gary, only to have the guy at Home Depot actually laugh at me for not being in crowd lined up at 8 AM.
I remembered my learned lesson to never try to shop store to store. We had dinner and stole power at Steak and Shake while I researched and eventually ordered a small 4500 watt generator from Amazon using the iPhone app. I remembered that I could actually get one day delivery for $3.99 with Amazon Prime. Suckas! Since it was late I had to hold out without power until the thing arrived Wednesday morning. I bought two more 5 gallon gas cans at Lowes.
I told all that what would happen was our power would go on before my generator left the truck.
I ended up back in Kenosha on Tuesday to work at a Panera Bread and buy the 800 watt inverter, heavy power cords and supplies at Menards. I noted that they were sold out of the cheap orange 16 gauge cords because your average Joe Six Pack was cheaping out and risking fire, overloaded cords, and low voltages.
I tried using the new 800 watt inverter. It couldn't power the fridge, and I have two full of food. I bought 4 20 lb bags of ice to put in the fridges just as they were getting to the hot 85 degree room temperature.
My neighbor grabbed me and we drove Tuesday night all the way to right near KLOT, about 75 miles south, to borrow a generator from his friend. We filled three 5 gallon gas cans, set it up and I rigged my new power cords to bring power to my place and got power on both fridges around midnight while he was able to drive his and his sump pump. My computer UPS didn't like the generator power so it beeped in protest.
I told the UPS delivery guy, who was kind enough to stop by me first when he saw the generator Wednesday morning that he beat the power company. But I was helping the neighbor connect his house panel to his generator. We pulled that off and he was able to get hot water from his gas heater with electric ejector to take a shower.
We heard from the John Deere repair guy who stopped by (Shouldda called first but...) that the power lines feeding us had trees on them in 3 places as they came east to us.
We set up my new generator. As I plugged in my house on that run the generator stalled. It was looking too small, but I restarted it and ran a heavy cable into the house intending to connect one fridge at a time when I noticed that the lights in the house were on.
As I was saying, the town owes me.
I'm going to do some testing of my new one, but I'm still vowing to buy a bigger generator ASAP.
I was sore beyond belief, frazzled and beat ta death but in the end I won the battle and we didn't lose any food in the fridges. They are still some 100,000 homes with no power until Firday or later.
Some lessons learned for ya all: Many big box stores and even the local Ace had a good supply of generators by Wednesday. They all had them trucked in overnight.
Mine will be ready to go. I figure we'll have the usual 2-3 more power failures before the year is out.
I only lost a bunch of tree branches, mostly because my weaker trees were felled last year. We lost a good sized oak next door.
To show my "good planning" although not even rain was forecast, I had let the car gas tank be dry. I've been getting a low fuel light since the previous Wednesday. I trusted that the fuel gauge in the wagon is way pessimistic. I've never put in more than 10 gallons at a fill up and it hold a lot more.
So we're leaving the driveway Monday morning on fumes, and I warned that we may end up pushing it, heading north to find a gas station with power which we heard was on the line just short of Wisconsin. What I didn't count on was all of the backups due to traffic lights being out. In the end it took about an hour until I pulled up to the first pump that worked, and added 11 gallons.
I watched a kid filling up about 6 big gas cans.There are trees and power lines down everywhere. A 6 foot diameter 100 year old tree downtown broke into chunks. The village told us to conserve water because per SNAFU they didn't have power for the pumps.
I got online at 2PM using WiFi in Kenosha to get into work and tell the boss that I was offline.
I recalled my previous hours of research into buying a generator where it occurred to me that there's no point in having a gasoline generator if you can't get gasoline. I had a tri-fuel generator on my wish list. My co-worker just reminded me of the east coast blackout where there was no power anywhere from Detroit to the Atlantic.
It took a while until we realized that this one was going to be long one. Once I had hashed out in my head that I really did need to buy a generator, we drove south late Monday night, intending to go as far as Gary, only to have the guy at Home Depot actually laugh at me for not being in crowd lined up at 8 AM.
I remembered my learned lesson to never try to shop store to store. We had dinner and stole power at Steak and Shake while I researched and eventually ordered a small 4500 watt generator from Amazon using the iPhone app. I remembered that I could actually get one day delivery for $3.99 with Amazon Prime. Suckas! Since it was late I had to hold out without power until the thing arrived Wednesday morning. I bought two more 5 gallon gas cans at Lowes.
I told all that what would happen was our power would go on before my generator left the truck.
I ended up back in Kenosha on Tuesday to work at a Panera Bread and buy the 800 watt inverter, heavy power cords and supplies at Menards. I noted that they were sold out of the cheap orange 16 gauge cords because your average Joe Six Pack was cheaping out and risking fire, overloaded cords, and low voltages.
I tried using the new 800 watt inverter. It couldn't power the fridge, and I have two full of food. I bought 4 20 lb bags of ice to put in the fridges just as they were getting to the hot 85 degree room temperature.
My neighbor grabbed me and we drove Tuesday night all the way to right near KLOT, about 75 miles south, to borrow a generator from his friend. We filled three 5 gallon gas cans, set it up and I rigged my new power cords to bring power to my place and got power on both fridges around midnight while he was able to drive his and his sump pump. My computer UPS didn't like the generator power so it beeped in protest.
I told the UPS delivery guy, who was kind enough to stop by me first when he saw the generator Wednesday morning that he beat the power company. But I was helping the neighbor connect his house panel to his generator. We pulled that off and he was able to get hot water from his gas heater with electric ejector to take a shower.
We heard from the John Deere repair guy who stopped by (Shouldda called first but...) that the power lines feeding us had trees on them in 3 places as they came east to us.
We set up my new generator. As I plugged in my house on that run the generator stalled. It was looking too small, but I restarted it and ran a heavy cable into the house intending to connect one fridge at a time when I noticed that the lights in the house were on.
As I was saying, the town owes me.
I'm going to do some testing of my new one, but I'm still vowing to buy a bigger generator ASAP.
I was sore beyond belief, frazzled and beat ta death but in the end I won the battle and we didn't lose any food in the fridges. They are still some 100,000 homes with no power until Firday or later.
Some lessons learned for ya all: Many big box stores and even the local Ace had a good supply of generators by Wednesday. They all had them trucked in overnight.
Mine will be ready to go. I figure we'll have the usual 2-3 more power failures before the year is out.
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