Thoughts on living without electricity for a few days

Unfortunately many organisations only have a facebook page, or update their facebook page a lot more often than their website.

I don't blame the local chippy, although being able to see when it's open or closed would be useful, but the community council not having GDPR-compliant means of communication is a nuisance.

Owain

Wrong.

Correct, but the others don?t kill modern digital mains powered equipment.

Could you now re-charge from a motor vehicle's 12v port with the engine on tickover, or even whilst you were out going places?

That was my first thought when I read about the storm and its effects.

They're effectively synonyms, I think.

Like Perspex and Plexiglass.

This company says that kerosene and paraffin are different, but only mentions additives to reduce the smeall:

Ah... well, it was there if you'd needed it.

A number of those mylar? silvery or gold space blanket sheets plus gloves as that sheet next to fingers radiates out your body heat rather than reflecting it back in. I assume that is why they are used at the end of marathon runs to better radiate away heat from heat-conductive sweaty bodies and sweat-sodden clothes. For anti-cold measures, build up of condensation is the problem, so more frequent change of clothes required

There was a shortage of tree-moving people and machinery as they were all busy moving other trees.

Owain

Quite a lot of small villages in the UK have a single road through them and maybe a T junction at one end like mine. Most roads round here had two or three trees fallen across them at first light last Saturday.

Where I live the farmers had pretty much cleared the roads of fallen trees by 10am (and had been at it with chain saws and tractors with prong attachments since first light). Those that fell parallel to the road or into fields got left. Any across the road were sliced and diced. A tractor can easily move remarkably big chunks away! I gather they get to keep the wood so anyone with the right kit & expertise was out doing it.

They won't tackle ones on power lines though!

Fortunateley many organisations only have a facebook page, or update their facebook page a lot more often than their website. It is a primary reasons not to use their products

So sack em.

We have a dozen hot water bottles, and a large (non-electric) kettle to fill them with. The cooker is gas, and there's an open fire in the living room. I generally maintain a good supply of fuel for both the cooker and the fireplace, as well as batteries and candles.

I rotate stocks of non-perishable foodstuffs - tinned, boxed, jarred, long-life milk.

We keep our Kindles charged, and have several portable chargers, one of which is solar-powered. The Kindles light themselves, so batteries and torches needn't be used to read.

On the list for next year is a decent generator, to keep the heating and refrigeration functioning.

J did the 2010 Freezer camp in 2010

It snowed - he lived.

Benefits of a community Facebook group: Shy people get to know their neighbours Elderly and disabled can get help The organising of communal effort, such as Christmas decs. Info exchange in a crisis, such as a power cut, water cut Redirecting misdelivered parcels and mail Finding good homes for unwanted items (rather than landfill) Alerts about road closures Alerts about road blocks (fallen trees, floods etc) Alerts about stray animals Alerts about injured farm animals Alerts about missing people Alerts about burglars on the prowl Advertising local businesses Recommendations and the opposite about tradesmen.

The list is endless.

Bill

I haven't find anything that my Honda inverter generator won't power, as long as it's less than the rated genny output. Incidentally, having powered a Panasonic microwave from the genny it appears that it takes the micro a second or two to build up to full power.

Bill

I did wonder about that. I ran two big Beco freezers from the genny and nothing untoward happened. I expected the genny to react audibly but it didn't. Just kept on chugging away.

Bill

I believe everyone under the the age of 20 has at last 2000 friends as a minimum.

I have about 30 friends on fb and 2 of them are dead.

One (still alive) is a good poster to this newsgroup that I just randomly want to see Sheffield news from.

Not really - although we are out in the wilds most of the local area was back on by 10am and decent sized cities with massive B&Q's about 20 miles away. We weren't on because the lines on the ground were in our segment - and then some clueless muppet marked it as "all fixed".

They are fine in a fixed draught free location but tend to dribble if you try to walk around with them or go outside. LED torches are magic.

The best if you can find one were the 3M patented emergency torches which were just in the filament lamp era and were made of dayglo yellow glow in the dark plastic. Left on a windowsill you can see by the stored sunlight light it emits once fully dark adapted. In midsummer the casing will emit enough light to see by for up to 8 hours (and more than enough to find it easily if the lights suddenly go off). I don't know how good the cheap Chinese knock off copies are - I have an original.

I have several rectangular LED torches for emergency use sitting face up and have their on/off switch bridged by a 470k resistor so that 10uA flows all the time. This only works on the ones with 3x AA cells in.

Single AA cell with step up current PSU torches wont do this. Although one of those is quite handy to have with the variable width beam.

There is a siphonic loop to dump heat into the HW tank and the radiator of last resort in the event that there is a fire and no pump. It makes the hot water tank very hot even with a quite modest fire.

I think that a policy of replace poles on failure (ie cutting back on preventative maintenance) has led to some of the cascade failures where poles went down like dominoes after just one failed. The wind gusting at a mere ~100mph should not be able to snap a good thick pole the way it did.

There hasn't been a really powerful storm for a few years so a load of geriatric poles were ready to fall over and/or snap part way up.

Mainly for going outside after dark. You could get away with less just for indoors. I happen to have quite a few 3W torches kicking around they are just the right size for illuminating difficult to reach spots in dark places.

Its got to have enough oomph to overcome the near stall current of the compressor of a fridge.

I've got a [remarkably tiny] cigarette lighter 60W USB-C charger in the car, it can charge my laptop, phone, tablet, mice.

I think space blanket is more useful in a hiking situation. They are used to stop you losing heat by radiation and evaporation. We do have some but I didn't even think of trying them. We were not *that* cold.

Sweating certainly wasn't a problem last weekend! Staying warm was.

At home nothing really beats quilted duck down for warmth at minimum weight. I had a thick jumper and a body warmer on indoors outside the heated living room.

Didn't have any issues with condensation. Walls in the coldest parts of the house ended up a bit damp as a result but that is all. Quickly returned to normal once the fire was on at full power again. Took a couple of days for the house core to warm up again to normal though.

Huge thermal inertia of the stone and masonry where the range used to be so we were cushioned from the worst excesses by residual heat in there.

Sounds both apocryphal and typical Apple at the same time. If you can only charge an iPhone from flat with its dedicated charger then it's a s**te design.

The car will normally charge an iPhone provided that the phone is still sufficiently alive to say hello. However, it seems the iPhone is rather more picky about what it will allow to recharge from a dead flat battery with its legs in the air. It isn't a problem I had run into before.

The iPhone almost never gets allowed to run down to a flat battery - in car it spends a lot of its time as a satnav and on charge. It came as quite a surprise that it would not take any charge at all from the car once it had become dead (as in Norwegian blue).

Recovered OK once mains was back connected to a real Apple charger.