Storm power outages

[Tim Streater]

3) Coupla boxes of candles 4) For those without gas, alternative cooking method, such as a small campingaz portable cooker.

[Artic]

[e-mail] scribbled...

Let's hope he spends a week stuck in his house.

[Artic]

Dave Liquorice scribbled...

Exactly why would someone be travelling to a unknown destination in such bad weather?

[polygonum]

I have a "big" USB battery - enough oomph to recharge my phone several times. Has built-in torch which (it claims) can run for over 600 hours. Obviously cannot do both! But prefer that as a basic form of light to candles with the dangers they represent.

Although we have gas, we have an electric cooker. Shame there is no way of inexpensively and temporarily connecting a ring or two to allow cooking.

[polygonum]

The destination might be well known - but the route not. A number of years ago I needed to go from London area to mid-Wales - a route I know very well, and both ends I know very well. The heavy rain was causing such bad delays on the M40 that I went off across country. Satnav would have been most useful - but I made do with my memory, signs and maps because I did not then have satnav. Despite that I arrived many hours ahead of a friend who decided to stay on the motorway at the same time. Despite having to drive carefully to avoid abandoned vehicles along a lot of the route.

[Davey]

You mean: a Map? Now there's a thought! It also requires the knowledge of how to read it, of course. I usually keep both a set of local maps and a National Atlas in my car.

Back in my days in the American Mid-West, standard in-car stuff in winter was: Space Blanket Cups/Mugs Matches Newspaper Chocolate bars/nut bars Shovel Bits of old carpet

And they were kept in the cabin, not in the boot.

I needed the space blanket once, when the Kentucky Freeway I was on was snowed to a standstill. In eight hours, the traffic moved half a mile.

[ianp5852]

Well, we have kept a conventional phone which is used every time we have a power cut to advise NEDL of same (3 times in last 6 weeks) We do have candles aplenty. We do have a two ring/grill camping stove and gas bottle to supply it. We do have the ability to have open fires in two rooms and have some fuel in store. We also, generally, have a fully charged spare car battery - which is one of two used for powering an electric fence and I'd really like to be able to run the oil boiler and router and laptop sporadically during power outages. I'm very interested in your point 2 concerning an inverter.

The boiler specifies a 5A supply but I guess this is only at startup. General running , I'd expect to be about 300W plus 100W for the circulating pump. Router and laptop would be very minor. So, total would be around 500W. Battery is 50-60Ah so, I'm guessing would run things for , at best, a couple of hours. As we'd have to presume any power outage could be a few days, it looks only practical for recharging a mobile phone and running laptop/router and radio. These things alone would be very useful.

Could I trouble you to point me to the sort of thing that might be able to do this? Thanks Please reply to group - email address is not monitored Ian

[damduck-egg]

Have a read of this,

As with anything you can buy cheap on Ebay but reliability and doing what it claims it can do usually costs bit more.

Personally I was thinking along the lines of running the car engine for the short period you may want to do a few things rather than run a battery down too far,especially a car one. For some people that is the only generator they have access to and in many homes won't have room for much else. Others may actually be better off with an actual generator if they have room for it and to safely store the fuel as well. But cheap ones aren't really designed to run for days. You really need a well built diesel one for that. That you have an electric fence suggests you may have a bit of land so do have a tractor? you can get generators that run of the Power take off but even if you need to charge a battery to run an inverter a tractor would usually be a better tool than a car. It's all about making the best of what you have.

G.Harman

[Bod]

I've used a small inverter from the car(400watt) on 3 occasions when we've had a power cut. I ran a small LED light and a laptop for a whole evening by just running the car for 10 minutes or so every hour.

[Jethro_uk]

Driving along an archipelago in Florida (head towards a national park at the end) I was amused to see all the houses on stilts with boats tied up below. But then the road was only about 1 metre above the sea.

[Jethro_uk]

Indeed, this (for me) is the greatest feature of sat navs ... the ability to dynamically recalculate a route in the event of . The only catch is, you need to watch it carefully to make sure it has really given up on the original route it had in mind ....

[dennis]

They may be travelling to known destination by an unknown route due to roads being closed. The satnav may know which roads are closed, the map wont.

[jgh]

I keep mine in the boot, but then I can open the boot from the passenger compartment. Once had to enter that way when I found I was blocked in so tight I couldn't open the doors.

jgh

[jgh]

How does a satnav know that roads are closed? A satnav is simply a map that knows dynamically where on the map it is, it isn't psychic.

jgh

[polygonum]

At least two of the satnavs I use are able to re-route on the basis of dynamically supplied information. Information about the traffic (speed, density, etc.) is fed into the routing and, if they identify an alternative route that should save more than some threshold time, they re-route. Amazingly effective they can be.

[John Williamson]

Some satnavs have a receiver for live(ish) traffic and road information. It's normally piggybacked onto classic FM, IIRC.

[Tim Watts]

On Saturday 28 December 2013 20:52 John Williamson wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Or it's running on a smartphone with 3G.

[Artic]

Davey scribbled...

Wot no guns ?

[dennis]

Mine runs a data connection and is pretty good at knowing what the traffic is like and where the hold ups are.

It gets data from the road sensors and from other satnav users out on the road.

[Davey]

On Sat, 28 Dec 2013 21:11:06 -0000 Artic