dioptase
Veteran Member
I just wanted to comment on our recent power outage experience, here in the SF Bay Area. (CA haters, please keep your hate to yourselves.) I know that I am nowhere near as prepped as most of you, so please be gentle in your comments there. I am doing what I can. We are in a somewhat semi-rural city here; properties in our neighborhood run from about 0.5 acre - 1 acre or maybe more.
We had another atmospheric river come through on Tuesday, which brought lots of trees down. (A redwood branch fell on our roof, but no damage, we think, other than maybe a pipe that came down in the driveway. Our neighbor's fir tree came down, narrowly missing both our house and our shed (which was trashed by one of OUR oak trees falling on it back on Dec 3, and we FINALLY just got the insurance company to agree with a second contractor's estimate for repairs ), and we had to call our arborist in to deal with that. The tree took out our property line wrought iron fence, so that will have to be repaired. We also have some other garden area damage, but the tree had to be removed before I could evaluate that (yet to be done).)
So the power went out here around Tuesday 11 am -ish. We checked PGE... "A team has been assigned." We were hoping to get power restored later that night (typical storm outages here are no worse than 5-6 hours on average), but in the meantime we had to resort to preps. (Wed morning, the PGE outage page said not to expect power back til late Friday night (it actually was restored late Thursday night); at that point, we decided to move to a motel for the interim.)
Lesson learned... do NOT store emergency lanterns with batteries in them. Doh. I was down to 3 lanterns (I was sort of, kind of, in the process of replacing older, clunkier fluorescent and krypton lamp lanterns with newer LED ones, but so far only had 1 LED lantern, "to try out"). Of those, 1 we couldn't turn on and couldn't even open to change the batteries - we think corrosion there just glued that shut. A second one had corroded batteries, but those we could remove - yet something is still wrong because with new batteries we couldn't get it to work. (DH thinks we need to do more cleaning of the contacts.) The third lantern was an LLBean LED lantern for camping, and that worked like a champ. On the same set of (previously used) batteries, we used it Tuesday night, then left it on Wednesday afternoon through Thursday night ("someone's in the house"), and it was still working.
(Two more LED lanterns were ordered and delivered yesterday - though not LL Bean ones. Also more batteries.)
I have some solar-chargeable lanterns which weren't charged (actually, I don't recall if they ever even have been), so I have to wonder if those will even work at all, if charged now. I guess I should try charging one.
(An aside... recently I went through all the batteries and we tossed the older ones which tested bad. DH wanted to "donate" all the rest of the (usable) batteries and as far as possible only go to rechargeable devices (including lanterns), but it is my experience (from small external battery packs which I use to power my cell phone on hiking trips) that I am not good about keeping things perpetually charged/recharged, so I vetoed that. (No space to set up a charging station... and most outlets are pretty much fully used anyway.) I hate to think if we had to rely on a charged lantern! (Look at those solar lanterns!) But we have plenty of batteries, and the two LED lanterns that I just received are also battery operated.)
(For those of you about to throw sticks as to why I don't have a solar panel for recharging batteries, and rechargeable batteries... well, I do have the panel, and a few rechargeables. Maybe I should get more. But to be honest I am stupid when it comes to batteries - I just don't understand battery technology, how often batteries must be charged, etc., I know nothing about battery "cycles", and I know that I am not going to be regularly charging batteries all the time, on an everyday basis. I have to go with what works for me. (And it IS me, as DH has little or no interest in managing batteries for small(er) devices.) All of our outages thus far have been short term; for longer outages, I can rely on regular lithium or alkaline batteries in the short term, and then meanwhile charge up rechargeable batteries. That might work for me.)
Light sticks... I have a good stockpile of light sticks of varying purchase dates (which maybe I should have recorded) and manufacturers. I put some of those out Tuesday evening (they are great for hallways and bathrooms, or until you can dig out a lantern or flashlight). When we came back home late last night (Thursday night), some of them were "out", but others were still glowing. So age/manufacturer may make a difference in longevity of the light.... but they all worked.
I have a good stockpile of candles and matches; we used a few candles but barely made a dent in that stockpile.
We were able to cook and heat water on our GAS stove (curses on the politicians who want to ban same ), and with the lantern, light sticks, and candles, we had lighting.
Our big problems were a) heat, b) Internet connectivity, c) fridge/freezer.
When we moved here, I wanted to arrange for an external generator, but there was no place to put one, nor to put a gas tank, so that was out. We have a fireplace of sorts, which seems to have a gas line (it is unclear if it is safe to use), but that has never been used. I think that I have one of those little Lil Buddy heaters (never used) stashed away, but it didn't occur to me until we decided on Wednesday (when we learned that power was expected to be out until late Friday) to move to a motel for the interim. (Judging from comments at check-in, we were not the only power outage refugees.) So that has never been tried.
Re Internet.... We have a large external battery which we keep perpetually charged (because of occasional brief power outages), which we used to charge our laptops and cell phones on Tuesday/Wednesday. (I also dug out a couple of my small external battery packs for the cell phone; they still had charge.) The big problem was that we live in a sort of a hollow, where cell phone receptivity is poor at best. I've been able to hot spot off my cell phone here during past power outages to get the Internet (on the laptop), but Tuesday/Wednesday it was very difficult - the net was up and down like a yo-yo. I'm not sure what the issue was there.
Re the fridge... DH was slow to go get ice, so he didn't even try until Wednesday (!!), and everywhere was sold out. Thursday afternoon he was able to get some. Ultimately, most of the stuff in the freezer stayed frozen (some ice cream and one package of meat were iffy so they were tossed). We ended up tossing some leftover and lunch meat from the fridge, but otherwise most things were okay there too. If DH had hopped to it for ice, or if we had a generator, maybe we would not have lost anything. I'm just relieved that the freezer was so packed that we had few losses there.
The maddening thing about all of this is that we have solar power... but when it was installed, the company doing it said that they could not install it such that we could use it during a power outage! Something about the system would feed charge back into the grid, and power workers could get electrocuted. It seems to me that all that is needed is some sort of cut-off/disconnect from the grid, and then we could run off the solar until power is restored, but we don't have that.
Next house (DH wants to move) we have some pretty clear priorities:
1. Alternate heating
2. Gas stove
3. Decent cell phone connectivity (so we can reliably get the Internet during power outages)
4. DH has plans for future solar systems, but he is waiting (or so he says) until we can get good battery power density, so that we can store power from the solar system. Obviously, we still need to do something about disconnecting the solar system from the grid to begin with!
That's my story. If it weren't so cold (not cold at all compared to what other folks have been/are dealing with, but cold for us with a house with bad insulation), we could (and would) have just stayed in the house, but it wasn't doing my arthritis any good. Easier just to bug out for a bit. (I have to admit that I was also having Internet withdrawals pains!)
Fwiw... When DH was back yesterday afternoon (checking for packages and getting ice for the fridge), he looked around the larger neighborhood. A mile from our house, 4 monstrous eucalyptus trees had all come down at once (they were planted all together) on top of some major/larger power lines. DH talked to the PGE crew working near our house, and was told that they were doing cutting and splicing in order to reroute power around that mess, so that other folks (like us!) could get their power sooner. DH said that they had barely started cutting those eucs yesterday (to get them off the power lines), and he thought that it looked bad for how long that job would take, before those folks could get power restored. (Really, whoever thought it was a great idea to plant eucs... They are notorious for dropping limbs, and are a serious fire hazard. We have several next door, and those are worrisome.)
We had another atmospheric river come through on Tuesday, which brought lots of trees down. (A redwood branch fell on our roof, but no damage, we think, other than maybe a pipe that came down in the driveway. Our neighbor's fir tree came down, narrowly missing both our house and our shed (which was trashed by one of OUR oak trees falling on it back on Dec 3, and we FINALLY just got the insurance company to agree with a second contractor's estimate for repairs ), and we had to call our arborist in to deal with that. The tree took out our property line wrought iron fence, so that will have to be repaired. We also have some other garden area damage, but the tree had to be removed before I could evaluate that (yet to be done).)
So the power went out here around Tuesday 11 am -ish. We checked PGE... "A team has been assigned." We were hoping to get power restored later that night (typical storm outages here are no worse than 5-6 hours on average), but in the meantime we had to resort to preps. (Wed morning, the PGE outage page said not to expect power back til late Friday night (it actually was restored late Thursday night); at that point, we decided to move to a motel for the interim.)
Lesson learned... do NOT store emergency lanterns with batteries in them. Doh. I was down to 3 lanterns (I was sort of, kind of, in the process of replacing older, clunkier fluorescent and krypton lamp lanterns with newer LED ones, but so far only had 1 LED lantern, "to try out"). Of those, 1 we couldn't turn on and couldn't even open to change the batteries - we think corrosion there just glued that shut. A second one had corroded batteries, but those we could remove - yet something is still wrong because with new batteries we couldn't get it to work. (DH thinks we need to do more cleaning of the contacts.) The third lantern was an LLBean LED lantern for camping, and that worked like a champ. On the same set of (previously used) batteries, we used it Tuesday night, then left it on Wednesday afternoon through Thursday night ("someone's in the house"), and it was still working.
(Two more LED lanterns were ordered and delivered yesterday - though not LL Bean ones. Also more batteries.)
I have some solar-chargeable lanterns which weren't charged (actually, I don't recall if they ever even have been), so I have to wonder if those will even work at all, if charged now. I guess I should try charging one.
(An aside... recently I went through all the batteries and we tossed the older ones which tested bad. DH wanted to "donate" all the rest of the (usable) batteries and as far as possible only go to rechargeable devices (including lanterns), but it is my experience (from small external battery packs which I use to power my cell phone on hiking trips) that I am not good about keeping things perpetually charged/recharged, so I vetoed that. (No space to set up a charging station... and most outlets are pretty much fully used anyway.) I hate to think if we had to rely on a charged lantern! (Look at those solar lanterns!) But we have plenty of batteries, and the two LED lanterns that I just received are also battery operated.)
(For those of you about to throw sticks as to why I don't have a solar panel for recharging batteries, and rechargeable batteries... well, I do have the panel, and a few rechargeables. Maybe I should get more. But to be honest I am stupid when it comes to batteries - I just don't understand battery technology, how often batteries must be charged, etc., I know nothing about battery "cycles", and I know that I am not going to be regularly charging batteries all the time, on an everyday basis. I have to go with what works for me. (And it IS me, as DH has little or no interest in managing batteries for small(er) devices.) All of our outages thus far have been short term; for longer outages, I can rely on regular lithium or alkaline batteries in the short term, and then meanwhile charge up rechargeable batteries. That might work for me.)
Light sticks... I have a good stockpile of light sticks of varying purchase dates (which maybe I should have recorded) and manufacturers. I put some of those out Tuesday evening (they are great for hallways and bathrooms, or until you can dig out a lantern or flashlight). When we came back home late last night (Thursday night), some of them were "out", but others were still glowing. So age/manufacturer may make a difference in longevity of the light.... but they all worked.
I have a good stockpile of candles and matches; we used a few candles but barely made a dent in that stockpile.
We were able to cook and heat water on our GAS stove (curses on the politicians who want to ban same ), and with the lantern, light sticks, and candles, we had lighting.
Our big problems were a) heat, b) Internet connectivity, c) fridge/freezer.
When we moved here, I wanted to arrange for an external generator, but there was no place to put one, nor to put a gas tank, so that was out. We have a fireplace of sorts, which seems to have a gas line (it is unclear if it is safe to use), but that has never been used. I think that I have one of those little Lil Buddy heaters (never used) stashed away, but it didn't occur to me until we decided on Wednesday (when we learned that power was expected to be out until late Friday) to move to a motel for the interim. (Judging from comments at check-in, we were not the only power outage refugees.) So that has never been tried.
Re Internet.... We have a large external battery which we keep perpetually charged (because of occasional brief power outages), which we used to charge our laptops and cell phones on Tuesday/Wednesday. (I also dug out a couple of my small external battery packs for the cell phone; they still had charge.) The big problem was that we live in a sort of a hollow, where cell phone receptivity is poor at best. I've been able to hot spot off my cell phone here during past power outages to get the Internet (on the laptop), but Tuesday/Wednesday it was very difficult - the net was up and down like a yo-yo. I'm not sure what the issue was there.
Re the fridge... DH was slow to go get ice, so he didn't even try until Wednesday (!!), and everywhere was sold out. Thursday afternoon he was able to get some. Ultimately, most of the stuff in the freezer stayed frozen (some ice cream and one package of meat were iffy so they were tossed). We ended up tossing some leftover and lunch meat from the fridge, but otherwise most things were okay there too. If DH had hopped to it for ice, or if we had a generator, maybe we would not have lost anything. I'm just relieved that the freezer was so packed that we had few losses there.
The maddening thing about all of this is that we have solar power... but when it was installed, the company doing it said that they could not install it such that we could use it during a power outage! Something about the system would feed charge back into the grid, and power workers could get electrocuted. It seems to me that all that is needed is some sort of cut-off/disconnect from the grid, and then we could run off the solar until power is restored, but we don't have that.
Next house (DH wants to move) we have some pretty clear priorities:
1. Alternate heating
2. Gas stove
3. Decent cell phone connectivity (so we can reliably get the Internet during power outages)
4. DH has plans for future solar systems, but he is waiting (or so he says) until we can get good battery power density, so that we can store power from the solar system. Obviously, we still need to do something about disconnecting the solar system from the grid to begin with!
That's my story. If it weren't so cold (not cold at all compared to what other folks have been/are dealing with, but cold for us with a house with bad insulation), we could (and would) have just stayed in the house, but it wasn't doing my arthritis any good. Easier just to bug out for a bit. (I have to admit that I was also having Internet withdrawals pains!)
Fwiw... When DH was back yesterday afternoon (checking for packages and getting ice for the fridge), he looked around the larger neighborhood. A mile from our house, 4 monstrous eucalyptus trees had all come down at once (they were planted all together) on top of some major/larger power lines. DH talked to the PGE crew working near our house, and was told that they were doing cutting and splicing in order to reroute power around that mess, so that other folks (like us!) could get their power sooner. DH said that they had barely started cutting those eucs yesterday (to get them off the power lines), and he thought that it looked bad for how long that job would take, before those folks could get power restored. (Really, whoever thought it was a great idea to plant eucs... They are notorious for dropping limbs, and are a serious fire hazard. We have several next door, and those are worrisome.)