Yes, I should have mentioned that an older phone lives beside the router, and was plugged in as soon as power went off, to keep in touch with the power company. Also useful to keep in touch with family.
Had forgotten 105 though, and called their 0800 number, having found a phone book.
I'm well aware of that :-(
Only if your mobile stays charged and the mast also has power.
Only if you do facebook, your mobile can do facebook, and the mobile stays charged and the mast also has power. The sort of phones that do facebook usually only have a couple of days' power capacity at best.
Owain
That's the other thing, looking up phone numbers when the internet's down.
I've got 105 and suppliers' numbers on labels stuck next to the meters so I don't lose them. I've just saved the council number on the mobile.
Owain
I have a small geny, a number of battery lamps and torches, 2 different camping stoves and a supply of candles. (Living in Surrey)
That's ower on standby. If you only turn the phone on when you want to send, the battery lasts a lot longer.
You were lucky to keep the cell towers that long, round here their power only lasts a day or so. Luckily we did not lose our power but I think unless the infrastructure is invested in more by cutting back trees and stuff, this problem will get more frequent. I do not recall in 1987 that any power cuts anywhere lasted more than a day.
I did live through the three day week but in those days we were warned of when power were going to happen on a rota, and hence could be prepared with batteries, like several lawn mower batteries, paraffin heaters and the like. As you say freezers were a concern. Brian
Yes one thing to be careful of is carbon monoxide build up, though back in them old days, you had drafts and lots of ventilators. The one issue turned out to be the water generated causing condensation everywhere. Of course in certain parts of the USA they get a lot of power out ages and you find many stores actually selling survival kits and generators etc. I heard these mentioned on some of the more rural radio stations you can sometimes find on the Internet, but previously on short waves. These days they are more hi tech of course, they always seem to include a gun or some knives. But then this is America. Brian
Quite a few years ago some digital equipment around at the time didn't like generators (and perhaps inverters), as they didn't produce clean sine waves but rather clipped square waves, often with a lot of spikes. A friend who ran a small shop found this out when he tried to run the till and digital scales from a genny during a power cut. The scales needed to be replaced. Are modern generators safe to use with all digital mains-powered equipment?
Only if they have a full sine wave output. Not all do.
Tim
We had trees down which brought down the power wires and blocked the road. No generators going anywhere till the trees got moved.
I don't.
I certainly don't have a facebook account, so even if I have to view a facebook page half the content seems to not appear.
Owain
True (the magic word is "inverter"), but I suspect that modern electronics is a lot more robust than earlier stuff.
Indeed. The value of not having a faecesbook account vastly exceeds the value of having one
Its all a bit problematical - today's switched mode psus will rectify mains to whatever the peak is, and it ifs a massive spike they may end up applying that to the SMPSU circuitry and blowing it
Most non electronic generators will be approximately sine, approximately
50Hz, but very poorly regulated,.
Until fairly recently, when our power went off, so did the power to the local mast. Now it stays on for 2 hours or so.
Going VoIP could make ham radio popular again...
A very subjective issue. All I will say is that it works for me.
Chris
I'm in North Yorkshire. We were without power 3am Saturday to 9pm Sunday. Part of the time spent being "on power" according to the incompetents at Northern Power grid but not in reality. Correcting that proved to be virtually impossible. Calls went to the Dalek which only asked "have you checked you main breaker" then dropped every time before you could actually speak to a human. My mate got through eventually.
I thought we were reasonably well prepared and we fared OK considering. Logs had just about run out (delivery was on the Sunday) almost no coal. No gas mains or otherwise. Survived using a 1970's era fondue set with spirit burner to boil water for tea and coffee and ate up Brexit pot noodle emergency rations. Able to check neighbours had hot water too. Couldn't quite boil water on top of the stove - hot enough for coffee.
I thought I had plenty of batteries but LED torches needed more and the DAB radio ate them like there was no tomorrow 4x AA every 8 hours use. My old Sony radio would last over a week per set of batteries.
We had to nip out on Sunday afternoon to get more meths and AA batteries since it was very unclear when power would be restored.
We have a log burner in the main room with a back boiler, linked to the CH, hot water and a radiator of last resort in the bedroom. I couldn't run the fire too hard without the pump for fear of boiling the system but it was more than adequate to keep the main living room warm and the chill off the bedroom. Snow on the ground and a hard frost meant that the rest of the house got dangerously cold. Fibre internet obviously down - POTS line continued to work. Mobile masts began to drop out after about 36h could just about reach next ones out but useless signal strength unable to access internet without travelling closer to them.
We relied on candles in the main room for light and played Scrabble and card games to pass the time. Torches everywhere else.
Wife's iPhone bricked itself by running out of power completely early on and in that state it refused to charge from the car USB 5v. Needed an Apple mains charger to get it back into the land of the living. It would happily take charge in the car provided that it was running normally.
Slight advantage there in that the bedroom was still habitable thanks to the radiator and putting the summer quilt on top of the winter one was enough to make it cosy. Hot water became insanely hot (dangerously so) - which was great for hot water bottles but exciting to wash with.
Mobile signals were still available to us at least for the first day. My own phone signal is normally so weak here that voice is OK, txts can take a very variable time to arrive and internet is impossible.
Being on FTTP I was very glad I went to BT and still had a copper POTS landline to ring 105 from.
A camping gas stove, power block and a generator are on my Xmas list. I might yet get a UPS for my computer (which could be repurposed in an emergency to run the CH pump for a while instead).
Our freezer was kept closed throughout and the kitchen temperature was probably about the same as inside the fridge (maybe colder in parts).
Freezer showed -3 and "too warm" alarm when power was restored. It had in effect defrosted itself. Most stuff was still (just) hard frozen. A ruthless cull of any old food with freezer burn was made and we are eating up anything that was in there at the time.
Although we do have a paraffin lamp I am not to keen to use it. They can start impressive fires if they ever get knocked over. I found LED torches of the 3W inspection type to be perfect for getting around with.
It might be an idea in this group to make an exhaustive list of the things that you might want to have handy in case of emergency (particularly if you depend on pumped potable water). We actually don't but I still have an emergency water container from my time in Japan.
In an absolute emergency I could have uncapped next doors well. My garden water butt was no good because there was 4" of ice on the top!
Local radio and classical POTS phone line back in the days when you could speak to a human rather than a badly programmed Dalek.
One thing I found was that it was impossible to tell Northern Powergrid that their "Information" was incorrect. The engineers who finally turned up late Saturday night to my mates house insisted that he (and I) were the only ones in the village without power (totally incorrect). They insisted on taking his main fuse out and then checking the drop wire from the pole to tick a box before they would do anything useful. Otherwise the system would charge *him* for their callout!
He got his revenge though he made them walk the 33kV line in the pitch dark until they found the downed pole about 3 miles away!
To cap it all when power was finally restored on the Sunday evening a text arrived simultaneously to tell us that there was "no prospect of getting power back tonight and we should if possible make alternative arrangements". On the Monday night I got another call from a field engineer sent to our village to restore power to those houses still flagged as being "off power" by a system that was completely unfit for purpose.
Once back on power checking their website map showed our village as neither being off grid nor having been fixed. Basically we didn't exist. There were still loads of flags of all colours but nothing near us!
Start of list of stuff to have for emergencies:
1x box of kitchen matches 12x candles 12x AA batteries (is that enough?) Nx pot noodles/cupasoups AM/FM radio *NOT* DAB 3W LED torch 10W LED torch Solar charger or power block for charging Smart phone. Fuel for whatever form(s) of heating you have. 5 gallons fresh water (changed monthly) if you are on pumped supply.My emergency lights did me no good at all they had both run out by 7am (run time is typically 4h from onset of power loss).
There is usually a choke to stop fast transients from causing damage. OTOH if the spike is high or wide enough then the next stage is toast.
One interesting behaviour we sometimes get locally is just one phase goes down due to a short to ground and trip on bare wire distribution.
In the good old days of filament bulbs it was immediately obvious as they would dim and go almost orange. Modern switched mode PSUs and LED lights continue quite happily on the reduced voltage. It is only when you go to make a cup of tea that the fault situation becomes obvious. (assuming you are on one of the two remaining good phases)
One thing to watch is that iPhones need to be kept topped up or they won't accept power from a default basic USB 5v charger in the car.
You assume here that 105 provides correct information. In my instance it did not :(
But at least after moving to BT for my FTTP service I did still *have* a POTS copper line to contact them on.
The other nasty is that mobile phone network base stations start to go down about 36 hours into a long power cut as well. Many of the places affected have poor mobile signal in normal times and the signal with it running on emergency batteries seemed to be weaker still.
Quite. Of course if you set out to have all and sundry as 'friends' you may have a bad experience.
The sorts of loads that generators really don't like are the very high initial starting current of a freezer compressor motor. The generator needs to be pretty beefy to cope with that current surge.
You might not want to attach expensive electronics to a generator just to be on the safe side but much of it ought to work OK. Don't blame me if you fry something expensive though. I have seen surge protectors save themselves by allowing the parts they were supposed to protect die!
It depends a lot on the kit.
Hardly anything that is properly designed these days cares one jot about the input waveform being a sine wave (my PC PSU for example will work down to about 90V and 49-61Hz according to its rating plate).
Modern switched mode PSU's can cope with an incredibly nasty input waveform since the first thing they do is rectify and smooth it to DC.
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