Electric furnace?

That part is true. For us, even our grocery stores and gas stations didn't have power for a few days, so we had to go to unaffected parts of town to get fuel. A couple of gas stations, thankfully, were quicker to set up their own giant generators so they could run the pumps and do business otherwise. A local grocery store had to do the same thing.

Reply to
Muggles
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For years I thought that the electric utility waited until they heard my generator start before they'd turn the power back on. Every darned time, except 2003 when they let me run the gennie all night long. Kept my husband's CPAP going, anyway.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

My experience has been the intel processors are not too bad in the heat department - I have i3, i5, and i7 machines and they all stay nice and cool without the fans running on high.

Those AMD monsters can be a horse of a totally different color. A few years ago a customer burned out 3 motherboards - actually BURNED through the circuit boards. Finally convinced him to go Intel instead of AMD, even though for a "gamer machine" the AMDs were significantly faster.

Reply to
clare

I don't have to carry my natural gas, and the pumps on the line are natural gas powered so they don't go out in power outages.

Reply to
clare

AFAIK, newer computers use less power than old ones. I5's and I7's run pretty cool. 84-90 watts. And LED's use less power than CRT's. SSD's use less power than spinners. High end graphics cards can get hot, but you might not need one.

Reply to
Vic Smith

Per snipped-for-privacy@aol.com:

Somebody in one of the generator fora coined the phrase "Lifeboat vs Cruise Ship"....

I opted for "Lifeboat" (2 KW Honda) and the neighbor for "Cruise ship" (6 KW Home Depot).

During the nine-day outage last year the neighbor was driving all over Southeastern Pennsylvania getting gas for his Home Depot monster while I was sitting at home experiencing a certain degree of schadenfreude....

Reply to
(PeteCresswell)

(-:

The newer CPAPs run on 12VDC as well as AC and a good sized battery - car or scooter can keep them going all night and even several days depending on the size of the battery. My ex-boss needed one and he was in bad enough shape not to be able to fuel or futz with a generator. Hooked up a 55Ah gel cell scooter batter from Harbor Freight to a 2A trickle charger so the unit was always battery powered. So far, so good.

This site

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claims:

But that has to be taken with a grain of salt because marine batteries come in all sorts of capacities and they didn't specify.

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alleges to list which machines run on 12VDC. The higher the CPAP setting, obviously, the shorter the battery life. I'd recommend anyone who depends on a CPAP look into battery backup power.

Reply to
Robert Green

Maybe it's time to upgrade your computer...

I have a new-ish quad-core i7-4790K, 16GB RAM, 1 TB internal hard drive,

1TB external hard drive, 256GB SSD, 1 TB SSD, fanless GTX750 graphics card, TV tuner card, firewire card, Samsung LCD monitor, cable modem, and wireless router.

The whole she-bang runs on a Cyberpower UPS and only uses 81 watts under typical loads (displayed on the UPS). That drops to around 60 at night when I turn off the monitor and the hard drives power down.

That's basically equivalent to a single incandescent light bulb.

If I really push it processing videos, I can get it up to 130 watts or so, but that's short lived.

Heat output is minimal. CPU-ID hardware monitor shows my CPU running at 98F degrees, the other components are at 85F-94F degrees. That's less than my own body heat (98.6F). :)

Anthony Watson

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Reply to
HerHusband

I've not used the woodstove in a few years, but it is comforting to know I can fire it up at any time. It had a griddle on the top so we can cook directly on it if desired. I like opening the doors though, to grill a steak.

The LED lanterns are great. They last 40+ hours on a set of batteries and are very bright.

Hurricane Gloria, 2 1/2 days in 70 years. Next to that, maybe 12 to 14 hours. Longest in winter was only a few hours.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

Back in the day when I was building 400mHz clones, the AMD chips would self-immolate if they lost cooling - i.e. if you booted up without remembering to reattach the fan.

Intel CPUs of the same vintage merely throttled back the operating speed when the cooling failed. AMD said it was the motherboard maker's responsibility to cover "cooling failures" but I found that very unsatifisying. Those huge coolers of the era could pop off if the machine was moved roughly and more than one CPU was killed on bootup because of it. I stopped using AMD based motherboards until they finally relenting and began building CPUs that didn't incinerate themselves.

Reply to
Robert Green

We typically use ours a few times a week during the winter, mostly in the evenings for the ambiance and cozy heat that only a wood fire provides.

However, last winter was so warm we were only able to use the wood stove a few times. It just gets too hot in the house unless it's in the 40's or lower outside. Long range forecast is for another warm winter here this year.

Interesting. I've never heard of grilling a steak on a woodstove.

Our woodstove is small (we have a small house), so we can only fit a pan on the sides. I probably wouldn't cook a meal on it unless I had to, but it's doable if it came to that.

Yep, I bought an LED lantern a few years ago. Still on the original batteries and going strong, even though we take it camping with us too.

We also have a few of these emergency backup lights plugged in around the house. They turn on automatically when the power goes out, nice when you're on the other side of a dark room. They also make nice flashlights if we need to move about the house or work on something.

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Thankfully, we don't get hurricanes here, and tornadoes are extremely rare. We did get two wind storms last winter that knocked the power out twice for 8-9 hours each (trees blew down on the power lines all over the county).

Anthony Watson

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Reply to
HerHusband

We have gas heat and water heaters, so we're at least warm and can take hot baths if the power is out.

Reply to
Muggles

Kind of what I was thinking too.... Using an i7 here and can barely hear the fan, there is no bulk air flow that you can feel blowing out the back with your hand. Power supply is smaller than what they typically were 20 years ago and back then you could feel the air blowing out the back, sometimes with multiple fans. The have had an energy star program to reduce PC power use for a couple of decades now.

Reply to
trader_4

A guy who lives near me had a similar experience. He had a 12KW Generac nat gas powered, maybe 5 years old. Started up every week for the routine check run. Very lightly used, power is generally reliable here. During a hurricane outage, a few hours into running, it died. He wound up buying a gas generator from one of the out-of-state guys with a rental truck. I'm sure that wasn't cheap. He had the service guys come out and they told him it wasn't worth fixing. So, he bought a new one. I got the old one, which, since it was only a few years old, I figured I could probably fix and keep. We knew the engine part was good, it started, ran for a minute, etc. Upon diagnosing, the rotor for sure was shot and possibly the armature. It would have been several hundred just for a new rotor. The I happened to look at the reviews on Amazon for Generac standby generators. They were horrific. All kinds of people in similar or worse situations, including new ones out of the box that were defective. A lot of people said they ran fine for the weekly test, then failed when needed. I came to the conclusion that for the money I'd have to put into it, versus what I'd wind up with, it wasn't worth it.

Reply to
trader_4

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Some nerd had a sense of humor and too much time on his hands to have a computer play Beethoven as its swan song.

Reply to
rbowman

I work in a quiet home office so I don't want to listen to computer fans all day. I replaced all of my CPU and case fans with these GELID FN-PX12-15 fans. Absolutely silent unless I'm really pushing the system hard.

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I have an Antec 650 watt power supply, but am obviously only using a fraction of the power it can supply.

Yeah, before I upgraded my computer a few years back, my computer provided a bit of heat under my desk. I was surprised by the temperature difference after upgrading.

Anthony Watson

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Reply to
HerHusband

Do you mean they have????

Reply to
clare

Shoulda played "Heatwave" by Martha and the Vandelas or at least "Light My Fire" by the doors. Or maybe Glen Frey's "The Heat is On."

I have a few exploded AMD CPUs in the "Drawer of Horrors" - blew the corner of the chip right off.

Reply to
Robert Green

When I switched from PIII and IV towers to laptops the power dropped from

150W to 17W per machine. With 10 machines throughout the house, that ended up be quite a visible savings on the power bill. Same for the new refrigerator and air conditioners. The switch to LEDs has been a little less dramatic because I was transitioning from CFLs, not incandescents.

Few people do and kids seem to want Play Stations and X-boxes now instead of PCs and that makes sense. I found nothing twitchier and quirkier than high end graphic cards.

It used to take ATI several versions to get their priciest cards to stabilize. Even then there was always an occasional GPF or BSOD in the middle of a game. I'm very happy using laptops and since I use them to power much larger monitors, I can get units with cracked screens for a song on Ebay. The only game still on any of my PCs (a retired tower unit I light up every now and then) is Tiberian Sun "Command and Conquer." The little soldiers are always polite and respectful, even after you've sent then on a suicide recon mission.

Reply to
Robert Green

I wonder if the weekly test used up all the hours of run time? Maybe if it were tested every six months, it would work when needed.

Thanks for the field report.

- . Christopher A. Young learn more about Jesus .

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. .

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

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