Preparing for Power Outages?

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Thomas D. Horne, FF EMT:

Suspicions. . . . . . . . *COMFIRMED*

Thanks for the validation.

[Neon John]

This is the fun thing about the internet. BI (before Internet), one might read about the occasional fruit-cake, weirdo, panty wetter or other deviant but unless one lived in a large city, one rarely ran into one. Here on the net they come out like flies after a fresh cow patty. Like going to the zoo without ever leaving the comfort of one's house.

Thus comes Tom who claims to be a "firefighter" (real 'uns usually call themselves "firemen" AND an EMT (God help his victims) who proceeds to lecture as if he were actually competent to do so. And he does it without ever once considering his audience or the situation. He's seen a training video or two and now he are an expert!

Tom, old buddy, I was a volunteer fireman when the best part of you was running down your mamma's leg... I'd hate to think that I'd wet myself over anything contained in a regular sized house. Perhaps if you'd ever actually SEEN a BLEVE or burning fuel you'd know how silly you sound.

I bet it comes as a surprise to you to learn that most folks in areas where oil heat is prevalent have 500 to 1000 gallon oil tanks in their basements. I had one when I lived in PA as did all my neighbors. Does thinking about fighting a fire in PA make you need to change your diapers? If that makes you leak yer water then you'd drown yourself at a house fire where the owner reloaded ammo and had a few hundred lbs of powder in the basement. BTDT. Spectacular.

What is so funny about this particular instance is that if my place ever caught fire and any firemen ever got there, they'd have been dropped from a C-130, as they sure as hell ain't gonna drive a truck in there.

BTW, if you have the cash laying around to pay for such an overwrought and grossly exaggerated "solution" as you propose - and let's not forget the blasting crew to blast out the solid stone around my place

- then go ahead and send it on. I'll use it to throw a big party for my firemen buddies and we'll laugh at your folly.

I know that the word is highly overused today but never have I seen a situation where the term "idiot" fit better. I just feel sorry for the folks who have to live and work around you.

John

[Mike Dobony]

Listen to the weather forcast. If they call for a major storm, fill the tub. DUH!!!!!!!!!

[Kurt Ullman]

At least since the mid-70s the chant was that firefighter fought fires while firemen rode in trains (for those younger folks there used to be a crewman on trains called fireman who stuck around long after diesels came about and there was no fire to tend, unions and all.

See above.

Or the arson fire seeded with elemental sodium and magnesium./ Now THAT is a fire to behold. Or the Seattle "Superfires".

>

[Mike Dobony]

We had no electricity from Friday 12 to Thursday 25. Sunday the 28 one family at the churh still didn't have electricty.

Crank powered flashlights and radio. Canned food. Generator w/5 gallons of gas. We have propane heat and a 5500 watt generator kept the whole house running, though through shutting off the furnace to heat up the water (electric heater) or the dryer. I would suggest a Coleman generator with the Yamaha engine. It should be quieter than our Briggs and Straton. I just saw one on sale for $4?? somewhere. Nix the candles and gas range. We cooked on the propane grill. There was still enough power throughout the town to have safe water all that time.

[mm]

Your word "period" is in seeming contradiction to your use of "primary".

On the other hand, while Pete, the author above, was careful to insert "primary", you don't use the word, but you retain the word "maximizing".

Either you don't know well many of the people you know who run businesses, or you run with a sad circle of acquaintances. Making a fair, a reasonable profit is the primary goal of the business owners I know. But at the same time, most consider other things, and most do some work or dispense some goods for free or at a reduced price.

There is somewhat of a legal question about how to do this when it is not a privately-held business corporation. One has to be prepared to explain to stockholders why one gave a financial break to someone and not someone else. But that doesn't stop all corporation CEOs, and they don't always do it for publicity, like the company last year that spent I'm guessing 10,000 dollars on some charitable purpose and then bragged about it in hundreds of TV commercials, costling far more money than they had given. Some do it quietly and without the goal of attracting more buisness.

One famous case was the owner of a textile mill in New England, the one who invented Goretex (sp?) who paid salaries for his whole company work force for the year or so they were shut down after a fire, because of the Biblical verse, "You shall not oppress the worker." (Sounds like Deuteronomy, not sure.)

So in many family and public corporations, the goal is NOT MAXimizing profits.

[mm]

My last quarer mile is underground. Beyond that is a part that runs over a stream from pole to pole. During a storm, a tree was knocked down and fell on the phone line which caused one telephone pole to snap, and the wires to fall on the ground and on the stream I mentioned. Part was under water and much more when it rained and the stream rose a couple feet.

But since the phones wwere still working, it took the phone company about 3 years to fix it. (If they had only told me how low on the list it was, I would have stopped calling them (3 times total. Once they came out and marked some things but it was still another 18 months.)

Yes, that could be very handy.

[BR]

When we had our longest outage, it was when a tree took out the service drops to the house. ALL of them, power, phone and cable for high speed internet. Back then I didn't have a cell phone, none of the neighbors were home, so I had to find a pay phone to call in the trouble. Since then, I took a job that required me to have a cell phone, it doesn't work great in our canyon, but if you go to the right part of the house, you can place a call.

[Mike Dobony]

Or spend a few months in Nigeria. On a good week they have about 15 minutes to a 1/2 hour of electricity a week. My son spent over 6 months there with his wife.

Mike D.

[Jim]

[....]

do you know how many years it takes for smokeless powder stored in the original factory cans to break down and become unstable?

serious question...

[Jim Yanik]

BR wrote in news:1aKdnaR7jLzhJXnYnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

Get a cable to charge your cellphone from your cars' cig lighter outlet. Then,if you lose AC line power for a few days,you still can charge your CP from your car.

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per [e-mail] :

In the past - before deregulation - the electric utility that I worked for pursued other goals - like reliability, public service, being a good neighbor to surrounding communities, the welfare of their employees, and so-forth.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the populace as a whole was better off then or is better off now but I don't think anybody would assert that the utility acted differently now vs then.

[Logan Shaw]

: :

Except for the ones that aren't businesses. For example, in Austin, TX, power is provided by Austin Energy, which is owned by the city. From

:

Austin Energy is the nation?s 10th largest community-owned electric utility. We serve 360,000 customers and a population of more than 800,000. We provide service within the City of Austin, Travis County and a small portion of Williamson County.

As a publicly owned power company and a city department, Austin Energy returns profits to the community annually. That money helps fund City services such as fire, police, EMS, parks and libraries. The utility has provided $1.3 billion in profits to the community since 1976.

Also, from

:

What makes the Texas experiment with deregulation especially interesting is that a "control group" has survived -- the municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives. Nobody disputes that higher electric rates are partly due to the near-tripling in cost of natural gas, the fuel for 46 percent of Texas power generation. But the rates of still-regulated city-owned utilities and electric cooperatives, which also use natural gas power plants, are substantially cheaper almost across the board.

[ ... ]

The cheapest service plan?one negotiated by the City of Houston?in the entire deregulated market is about 35 percent more expensive. What accounts for this difference? "[T]he energy being sold in the deregulated service areas didn?t cost any more to produce than in the regulated areas," says Biedrzycki of Texas ROSE. "The difference is in the way the pricing is established."

I don't think the government should run everything, but in this case it seems to be working pretty well. Our rates are lower, reliability is fine, customer service is OK[1], and they have programs to save energy (like thermostats that "phone home" and shave off the demand peaks in the summer) which seem fairly smart. They're not perfect, but I can hardly imagine a profit-motivated corporation would be better, and if the rates are a minimum of 35% higher in exchange for nothing, I'll take a city-owned utility myself.

Oh, and since the above mentioned not just city-owned utility companies but also cooperatives, here's the web site of a cooperative in an area near Austin:

- Logan

[1] except when you move, they ALWAYS mail your final bill to the address you moved FROM, i.e. the address where you no longer live, and it's been that way for 15+ years...

[Thomas D. Horne, FF EMT]

John I got mad at what I perceived as your indifference to the safety of others and I was sarcastic and flame throwing in my reply. I don't know you well enough to criticize you like that and I apologize. I do mean that. I regret my snotty tone.

My point however crudely made was that it is not something you were doing just in your house when it involves the public utility power grid. Obviously I also angered you with the tone of my reply so your looking for a little pay back. Have at it. I have some coming and I won't melt.

As for my fire service experience I've been a serving firefighter since

1971. I've fought a few fires. Not as many as some I suppose but a few. I use the term firefighter because it is the recognized term of art in the craft. Firemen tend fires. Firefighters put out the ones that are unwanted and or destructive. I've seen a couple of BLEVEs but they were deliberately caused for training or public education purposes. I've also seen the aftermath of one small scale accidental one involving some sort of spray can in a campfire and a larger one when a church maintenance worker in California tried to make an ordinary water heater provide 190 degree water to a newly installed dish washer. When the water heater failed it took out two adjacent walls one of which was masonry and part of it went right through the roof with enough energy to come down a couple or hundred feet away. Funny how much bang you can get out of fifty gallons of water when you plug the relief valve with a pipe plug and tamper with the temperature control of a water heater. I have never personally seen a BLEVE involving a flammable liquid in a larger quantity like a five hundred fifty gallon fuel tank or larger. I was perfectly satisfied with the twenty five pound propane cylinder that was used to make the public education video and the twenty five or thirty five gallon drum that they used to demonstrate a BLEVE in training. With only ten or so gallons of fuel it made a dammed impressive fireball when it blew.

For those of you who don't know what the difference is between closed drums and a properly installed tank, a houses heating fuel tank is vented when installed and it is equipped with a fusible link to cut off the flow to the line to the boiler or furnace when the link temperature is exceeded. Since it is a normal part of a dwelling; unlike the odd hundred pounds of smokeless powder or a hundred and sixty five gallons of combustible liquid in un-vented drums; it will be detected during the first arriving officers circle check of the burning structure. It's vent and fill pipe is something that a well trained or experienced fire officer will look for and take into account when developing a fire attack.

The gun powder or the fuel drums are a different issue because their presence cannot be detected during the fire officers size up. If like Neon John you live too far out in the country for the fire service to help you then I guess there is nothing to do but satisfy yourself that you and yours won't be in danger. I'm assuming that most folks on Usenet would not want to hazard their firefighters needlessly and might be interested in ways to avoid that.

One of the firefighters who was a presenter to my Fire Science Hazardous Materials class addressed the problem of the home storage of firearms and reloading supplies. He was disabled in the line of duty when as a nozzle man he had made the second floor landing in a perfectly ordinary home and a loaded shotgun stored under the bed in the fully involved bed room cooked off both rounds and blew him across the landing and down the stairs. The thrust of his presentation was that the most benign seeming buildings can hold the largest dangers.

The point of all this is that it's often fairly easy to cut the firefighters a break just like it is fairly easy to look out for utility workers in how you connect a generator. So why not invest the time and effort in doing so.

-- Tom Horne

Well we aren't no thin blue heroes and yet we aren't no blackguards to. We're just working men and woman most remarkable like you.

[Tom Horne, Electrician]

Matthew That is pretty impressive for that size of generator. Would you mind sharing what brand and model it is.

[Too_Many_Tools]

After reading this discussion, I have not seen anyone mention the obvious....

Once you think you are prepared, test your preparations by living without power for a few days.

All it takes is to shut the power off in your house and see if you can survive.

Better to find any omissions or problems before the real thing happens.

TMT.

[BR]

I do that once a year when I participate in Amateur Radio Field Day. I usually don't go out in the woods or a public park like some groups do, I operate class "1E" which means one operator using my home station on emergency power. The event lasts for 24 hours, which proves out how well the generator holds up, as well as other things.

[Don]

"BR"> wrote

We are so far back in the sticks in a very sparsely populated county that no broadband will ever be available so the choice is dialup or satellite. We have the Hughes satellite which works pretty good most of the time. When the power goes out we'll run the generator through a PC power backup and then plug the computer and satellite modem into the power supply and be back online pronto. The only downside so far, and I'm going to fix it is, our satellite dish is on the peak of the 2nd floor roof and not easy to get to and when it gets real cold and then rains the dish loads up with 3" thick ice, making it unworkable. So right now I am investigating a solar powered heater coil that will wrap the dish and the feedhorn effectively eliminating the ice buildup. Kinda pricey though at $400.

[Don]

"mm"> wrote

Is that how you run YOUR business? Or are you just spreading heresy? I have been successfuly running my own business since 1983 and maximizing the profit is the PRIMARY goal. All that other stuff you were rumoring about simply reinforces that PRIMARY goal. Running your own business is a little different than just talking about it. Onward.

[Thomas Daniel Horne]

What a fabulous idea. I like it. I'm newly licensed as a Ham so I'll begin my field day preparations now and test them under the pressure of the contest. That will give the entire family a taste of what a period of no outside help is like.