Well that was fun!

[EdFred]

I wake up Sunday morning to the sound of a boom at about 6:30. Oh, I bet a transformer blew and the power just went out. Get up, check everything, and all is well. So I go back to sleep, and when I finally get out of bed to make breakfast at 9:30-10:00 I notice all the power is out. Great. So I head over to mom and dad's to take a shower and all that good stuff. The hot tub started at 102 and the house was still 60 (I keep it at 62 at night anyway) when I left so I didn't worry about it.

I end up having dinner with a friend and then hanging out at that friend's place till about midnightish. Dad said he saw utility trucks down the road from me at about 10:30 so I run back to mom and dad's pick up the dog, and head home figuring power should be on. Nope, but the temp in the house is 57, and the dog is a great little mini furnace so I sleep there anyway.

The next morning dad brings a generator by and we hook it up to an exterior plug that runs to a subpanel that my furnace is on. Well, as long as we can get the furnace running I'm good. Well, that doesn't happen as planned, so I take stuff out of the freezer and stuff it in the snow banks to keep it frozen and head to work.

At lunch I come home and decide I will cobble something together to at least get the furnace going, and to get a waterbed heating pad tossed over the pump on the hot tub just in case for some reason the water freezes out. I don't expect it to with 350 gallons of warm water adjacent, but better to be safe than sorry. Luckily my utility room has no drywall, access to the subpanel, junction boxes, and an exterior duplex outlet comes in through the utility room.

So, I disconnect the exterior outlet from the current circuit it's on (it was at the end of the run) and find about 100' of Romex I had out in the workshop. I strip each end, wire nut the Romex at the junction box the outlet was tied to, and start figuring out how to get the furnace running from the other end of the 100'. So I pull the cover off the switch of the furnace, but to no avail. The common goes into the furnace rather than being twisted in the box and I don't feel like digging into the guts of the furnace.

OK, lets just hillbilly this thing together. I take the free end of the Romex and and just run it straight into the furnace breaker. Yep, two wires going into the furnace breaker. Definitely up to code, especially with 100' of electrical wire loose on the floor. But, the furnace works, and the fridge works. OK, that's the biggie for now, so it's back to the office after isolating that breaker so I don't backfeed to the rest of the house and to the utility lines.

I come home, still no power, so I figure I will head up to Lowe's, get some extension cords and a work light, so I can open up the hot tub, and get the heating pad tossed over the pump. I figure a hundred degree on the tub pump should work even if the power is out for the next 4 days, considering there's chlorine in the water also. So I get that all taken care of, and I figure there's enough extra wattage in the generator I will get another circuit working so I can watch TV. I make a jumper wire to run from the furnace breaker to a breaker on the other half of the panel (yes, I would have had 3 hot wires going directly into the breaker), and just as I'm about to connect to the other breaker all the lights come on. Figures the timing would work that way, right?

Even though it was 20s here, and I was out of power for 30 hours before the furnace got running, the house had only dropped from 62 to 52. And 36 hours before the power came all the way back on, the hot tub only dropped from 102 to 88. So that's some pretty good insulating I think. So, I put everything back the way it should be, and enjoy Christmas Eve Day and Christmas with power - only to wake up this morning with no power again. Arrrgh.

Well, since I got a rechargeable LED worklight for Christmas I put that to use today as I decided to go a bit more legitimate on the temporary set up. Cut the power to the sub from the main so i didn't backfeed, tied the Romex into a junction box in the utility room that was on a circuit to the subpanel, moved some breakers in the subpanel around so I could get the furnace, utility room (where my cable modem and router are), refrigerator, and back living room circuits running. So, even though the power was out from sometime before I woke up until almost 7pm this evening, I was able to keep warm, not have to worry about my food, and watch DVDs while the power was out. After it came back on tonight, I made the temporary solution permanent by cutting the 100' down, and running the wire as it should be run. That way when it goes out Saturday...

 

[Jim Logajan]

Ah, the joys of multi-day power outages with power restoration flirtations - I can relate ...

We live in a rural area and everything that makes the house a civilized place to live runs on electricity - including water pump and hot water. It doesn't take long for the house to feel like it is not much more than an insulated cave when the power goes out.

So ... as of last week our house is now on a standby whole-house propane powered 20kW Generac generator. Had a 250 gallon propane tank installed to handle multi-day outages. It cost a bundle ($2050 just for the tank installation with 208 gallons of propane) and a yet-to-be-billed generator install (estimated at no more than $10,950.)

We're ready now for the zombie apocalypse.

 

[catmandu]

Propane fueled generator with an automatic switch feeding a 50 amp subpanel of the bare minimums: so very flippin' nice, worth every cent of the $5k install price ten years ago (1k propane tank already here to fuel the boiler and the stove).

 

[Tom-D]

10 years ago we had outages every winter, so we installed a gen-tran panel to power up 6 circuits of the house off our generator, we haven't have a power outage over 10 minutes since.

now we have the motor home we just move out there and live off the batteries until the power comes back on. But --- we haven't had to do it yet.

 

[DesertNomad]

When I lived in Tbilisi we would generally only have 4 hours of power each day from December to February. We had no space for a generator. I appreciate electricity now more than ever before.

 

[timwinters]

Whole house manual transfer switch and an 18KW generator on a small trailer in the barn.

Priceless! Especially since I didn't buy any of it...it came with the house.

We've only had to use it once in the six years we've been here even though we're in BFE.

 

[tmyers]

I have a similar setup Ed, and can power the furnace, sump pump, and the upstairs and downstairs fridge.

When my dad was in the Hospital (2010) we had an ice storm that took out most of the power in our area. J and I were at the hospital constantly. That genset would run from 0530 to 2030 on one tank of gas.

Great little addition to the tool shed.

 

[EdFred]

Whole house manual transfer switch and an 18KW generator on a small trailer in the barn.

Priceless! Especially since I didn't buy any of it...it came with the house.

We've only had to use it once in the six years we've been here even though we're in BFE.

That's the plan going forward. I've got 200A service, 100 to the shop and 100 to the house. Put a 220 plug in the shop on a 100A breaker and feed everything from there after throwing the main cutoff from the utility. The problem here is they were smart to run all the power lines through the trees, so any time an ice storm comes up its a mess.you'd think it would have been cheaper in the long term to bury a lot of it.

 

[Geico266]

That's the plan going forward. I've got 200A service, 100 to the shop and 100 to the house. Put a 220 plug in the shop on a 100A breaker and feed everything from there after throwing the main cutoff from the utility. The problem here is they were smart to run all the power lines through the trees, so any time an ice storm comes up its a mess.you'd think it would have been cheaper in the long term to bury a lot of it.

It is still less expensive to hang the wire from poles. Having customers without power for a few days is of concern to power companies, but not the highest priority.

 

[steingar]

Yeah it does suck to live in Michigan. Last time we lost power for any length of time it was after the remains of hurricane Ike blew down full grown trees.

 

[Skylane81E]

Yeah it does suck to live in Michigan. Last time we lost power for any length of time it was after the remains of hurricane Ike blew down full grown trees.

At the time I lived in a neighborhood with underground electric, so the downed wires that got us got a lot of houses and bumped us up the priority list.

We had power back in 8hrs

Angie was living with overhead lines and went 8 days

 

[tmyers]

We went 6 days with no power after Ike Blew through then 5 days after the ice storm in 2010.

We live at the end of a grid, and our little section only has 10 houses on it. Typically when we are without power the people across the street have power as does our neighbor to the north,

The utility companies go after the repair that beings the most customers back on line so we are almost always last.

 

[EdFred]

When I went to and from Lowe's they were working on getting a downed tree off a line up the road from me to the west. Four houses to the east they had power all day long. When I came back, the crews had the tree off the line, and houses along the street had power, until I got 4 houses away. So eight of us were still without for another couple hours. No idea why the 8 of us were without since there were no other trees on the lines, and there are no other trunks to supply just the eight of use power.

 

[EdFred]

It is still less expensive to hang the wire from poles. Having customers without power for a few days is of concern to power companies, but not the highest priority.

I would think that paying crews double/triple/holiday time, and contracting crews to come in from as far away as Kansas, it wouldn't take much in the way of burying lines to save money.

 

[Clark1961]

I would think that paying crews double/triple/holiday time, and contracting crews to come in from as far away as Kansas, it wouldn't take much in the way of burying lines to save money.

When designing the line, any future costs will get PV'd out and have very little impact on system cost.

If underground can be plowed in then it isn't too bad in terms of cost. In a subdivision there is going to be a lot of trench work and that is going to be expensive. I've got over 10 square miles of facilities served by underground electric that we built. It isn't a lot of fun when things go wrong. Just isolating the problem can be expensive in terms of labor.

 

[timwinters]

I would think that paying crews double/triple/holiday time, and contracting crews to come in from as far away as Kansas, it wouldn't take much in the way of burying lines to save money.

Ed, that's just not the case...if it was, then they'd do it. We get a lot of ice down here so all the power companies have an aggressive and proactive tree trimming program.