Ping Leon: You OK?

[DerbyDad03]

We haven't heard from you in a couple of days. I hope the weather hasn't impacted you too severely.

Let us know.

[Dave in SoTex]

Leon may be w/o power or internet service or both. Much of Houston's power has been restored. Just saw that there "only" about 45k still w/o power vs. the high of 1.2 mil. My NW-Harris-County power has now been on uninterrupted since 9:30 a.m. yesterday after 55 consecutive hours w/o. Night before last it was

52 degs in the house with but a puny gas log fireplace and some of the gas stovetop burners for heat. I've had a Little Buddy propane heater running on low in my well pumphouse continuously since Sunday. Life seems almost back to "pandemic normal."

Dave in SoTex

[Leon]

Still here!!!

[DerbyDad03]

re: "Just saw that there "only" about 45k still w/o power vs. the high of 1.2 mil. "

How many have homes that have been ruined by burst pipes? That's mainly what you saw on the news but I don't recall seeing numbers on how many are in that situation. Getting the power back on is great, but if the flooding damaged any of the mechanicals or power equipment, they could still be in trouble heat wise.

Of course, it begs the question as to why they didn't let the water run before the pipes burst. Ignorance, I guess.

We had a few ice storms in my area, the worst being back in the mid-80's. Five days without power. Luckily, the temps hovered around 40, so it was cold, but not dangerously so. Gas still worked so the stove provided some heat.

Worst part was that I had just upgraded my furnace before that winter. The old furnace had a manual valve that allowed the furnace to operate without power as long as you adhered to a strict duty cycle. Code doesn't allow that these days.

I added a transfer switch and inlet a couple of years ago so I can use my generator as long as I can get gas.

[Leon]

Yes but it is daylight and warmer now. We will see at 9 pm tonight if there are only 45k with out power.

A lot of people have broken pipes. My son has a broken pipe. Fortunately he shut the main valve going to his outside water softener and drained the pipes in his house before the freeze. That main pipe froze and broke outside the house and above ground. Hopefully that will be the only problem. The next problem will be getting parts for this easy repair.

WE left our water trickling at 3 sinks and have had no issues so far. But we have a couple of nights with a hard freeze forecast, fortunately only in the 20's, I hope. ;~)

;~) So the wise authorities say, "turn off the water coming into your home and drain your pipes". This will prevent low water pressure...and your pipes from freezing inside your home.

Sooooo if you do this you actually have NO water pressure. What is the point of preserving pressure if every one turns their water off?

In 1989 we got down to 7 one morning. That was cold. Did not loose power. In 2008 we lost power for 11 days during Hurricane Ike. That was in the summer and miserable. Fortunately a cool front moved in immediately after the hurricane hit so we eased into misery vs. immediately. Last night before our electricity was restored our inside temp was 57. No gas range or fireplace.

;~) We had a gas range until July of last year.

I have a generator but did not really need it, it is not large enough for much more than a few lights, freezer and fridge. Our freezer still showed Zero degrees after 23 hours of no power.

We did get to listen, for 23 hours, to the whole house generator run 4 houses down.

[Scott Lurndal]

So that the fire hydrants still work. They're talking about [reventing low system pressure (due to thousands of broken pipes), not your house pressure.

[DerbyDad03]

I got a really good deal on a Coleman 6250/5000 watt generator. Barely used. A guy bought it for his camp, where he keeps an RV. He said he was getting too many comments that it was kind of loud, so he bought one of those Honda inverters which are much quieter. Sold me the generator for $275.

I added a manual interlock to the panel and rearranged some circuits to split them relatively evenly between the 2 bus bars. I marked my breaker map with a red G next to the circuits that I want to use with the generator. I made a 240V cord that's long enough to reach from under my deck where the generator lives to the inlet. The location keeps the noise down, neighbor wise. I don't even have to move it. I just plug it into the house and start her up.

We haven't had a major outage since I set it up (of course) but I test it once a year just to be sure. We had an outage during the summer of 2019 and even though the repair estimate was only about 3 hours, I used it as a "live drill" opportunity and ran the house on the generator during the outage.

[krw]

Some did. Didn't help. The pipes froze anyway and it didn't help at all when the had no electricity to the pump. I also heard that some communities were without water. No electricity, no water.

I've been in ice storms at both ends. One where it got back into the

50s and 60s. Everything in the freezer thawed. Another when it went to zero and we froze.

Using the stove for heat is pretty dangerous. Not as bad as some using their cars but...

It doesn't take a lot of electricity to run a gas furnace. My father was going to do it by putting a plug on the blow. He did know what he was doing (an EE professor - power specialty) but code, and all that rot.

[krw]

Amazon.

Stuff doesn't grow in the distribution system. If you lose pressure, the whole system has to be purged, inspected, and holy water sprinkled over the water, or something.

<...>

Two neighbors, two houses on either side of us have them. We lose power more often that we should but it's only been a problem once. We have a gas fireplace so it helps a lot and we have blankets. My wife with no TeeVee was the worst part of it.

[Leon]

Yup! A lot of water outages, we had that problem for a short time. so we boil our water that we are drinking out of the faucet.

Correct! And why vented hoods are installed over gas ranges. Same emissions as a gas furnace and water heater, and those are vented outside.

[Leon]

Sooo I can see that but there are broken fire hydrants too...spewing water.

[Sonny]

Cousin in Clear Lake (SE Houston) lost power for part of one day and during daylight hours; water pressure down only slightly; has nat. gas so he was fine. His wife was visiting her sister in Galveston: no power for several days; broken pipes, so no water. House is a wreck from water damage. They locked up everything this morning and headed to Clear Lake. I suppose the roads were clear enough to drive.

Some Texas folks evacuated to here, Lafayette, La. Quite a few parked over night in the RaceTrac (gas station) parking lot, near me. Huge icicles hanging on front and back bumpers, inside wheel wells, also.

Sonny

[Leon]

Yes Amazon, he tried that and earliest arrival is early March...

Doing that now. A major pump failed up line from our lake reservoir north of houston two days ago. We had to revert back to our local well.

[Leon]

We heard that Galveston lost 95% power. Water damage is a "thang" in Galveston, hurricanes and all... sucks! Roads were decent yesterday afternoon here in west Houston/Katy.

I was not sure you could get away from the cold on this one.. LOL

Both my truck and my wife's car had ice circles down to the ground. 3" of snow and ice on my hood. And we still have some snow/ice in our flower beds.

[Scott Lurndal]

I suppose they didn't think it necessary to use the northern style fire hydrants where the valve itself is belowground.

[Leon]

I do believe the valve is low but IIRC not below where it couples to the main. That union is above ground and in some cases a few feet above ground on the old ones, subsidence.

[Scott Lurndal]

[Sonny]

We didn't. Got down to 17°, second coldest Mardi Gras ever. Got down to 15° in 1899, the year of the Valentines Day blizzard. We had rain (froze) and sleet.... probably some dusting of snow, but not during the day. Roads iced over, preventing travel for only one day. I was prepared. Only time I went outside was to maintain water and food for the birds, squirrels, etc. Though windy-cold, it was kinna nice to get out for some fresh air. Lafayette had water pressure issues, but no boiling water advisories as with some towns. No power outages here, either.

Why are you parked outside? I thought you had built a house with a 3 car garage! You must have bought more than just a Sawstop (and didn't tell us) to fill those bays.

Sonny

[DerbyDad03]

I almost did the plug thing. Well, I thought about. Not sure if I ever would have actually done it.

When I decided to shop around for a generator, I was going to go small. Just enough for the furnace, the fridge, freezer and a few lights. We can live pretty simply when we have to. We both grew up that way, so it's no big deal.

I considered putting a single receptacle right near the emergency shut-off for the furnace, and running a short cord with a plug into the emergency switch box. If there was a power outage I could just unplug the furnace from the receptacle and plug it into an extension cord from the generator. Definitely not code compliant during normal operation, but simple and safe during an outage.

Lo and behold, I got a really good deal on a bigger generator so I went fully code compliant with an interlock, inlet, properly rated generator cord, etc. I traded a couple of emails with Fretwell (from a.h.r) just to make sure that I was doing everything right and that it would pass inspection if it ever comes to that.

It's a pretty nice set-up that I'm fully confident with using.

[invalid unparseable]

That was in interesting read. It also answers a question I never cared enough to search for an answer: why are fire hydrants sometimes called "fire plugs"?

In a "this is rec.woodworking" vein, I'm now wondering how the logs were hollowed out to make the wooden water mains. Drilling a hole lengthwise through a log seems tricky enough with modern tools. Doing it in large quantities before steam engines must have involved some interesting techniques.

And more "Bonus Facts:" those fire cisterns mentioned as a "colonial" water store for fire fighting? Still exist in San Francisco. SF has two independent water systems. One is household and fire hydrants, one is fire hydrant only, for backup. The two have different styles of hydrants. Sometimes you'll see hydrants for each system next to each other.

Better pictures:

More official: Elijah

------ joining a collection of logs into a water main must have also been tricky