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Rolling a 1 on preparedness*
Dec. 13th, 2010 12:15 pmWe lost power yesterday around 2:30pm. By 4pm, we realized that this wasn't going to be just a short blink so John and Chris went down to fire up the generator.
... which didn't work. They took Chris's 4-wheel-drive truck out to get a new battery (don't ask me why, I don't pretend to understand the setup).
... which didn't fix whatever the problem is.
Since the generator is a loan and not actually ours, we're a little hesitant to dump lots of money into trying to fix it. Plus, by that time it was dark, and trying to troubleshoot a generator with only a flashlight is something less than effective. It was agreed that we'd go out for dinner (yay hot food; the route to Big Boy was not fantastic, but it was mostly plowed) and then Chris and John would go buy a new generator.
... not on a Sunday evening after 6pm. Everyplace nearby that sells generators was closed.
A generator was obtained this morning, which is powering a very small subset of the house. We have to pick between heat and water (right now, we've picked heat), but there's enough to charge cell phones and give limited laptop internet access. The refrigerator and freezer are running, so we shouldn't lose any of the food. Once everything's heated and charged, we'll shut it all down and bring up the well pump, and see what sort of excess electrical capacity we have then.
In the meantime, I'm somewhat shocked at how unprepared we are for winter. Oh, John and Chris put a lot of effort into re-wiring the electrical panels so that a generator hooks in nicely to power the essentials, and that works very nicely. The only reason we have the heat vs water problem is that the only generator they could buy is smaller than the borrowed one by 2000 watts, and the re-wire project assumed a minimum of the borrowed generator's capacity. But for everything else? We don't have as many flashlights as we have people in the house. The dozen or so gallons of water I had stashed away the last time we had a power outage have disappeared; I don't know if they've been moved or discarded. I can't find the matches at all, and I can only find half the candles. I know we used to have some Wet Ones in the house, but I can't find those either. Extra blankets (which we fortunately did not need this time around) are stored in the basement rather than someplace accessible (the basement has zero windows, so no power means total darkness even in the middle of the day). Also, I am behind on laundry and am wearing my last pair of clean underwear.
Fortunately, this power outage is localized to us (we can see the downed line; it's on the parts of the pole that come up to our house from the street), so we can take advantage of friends... once the roads are plowed a little better and we can actually get somewhere. A couple of us have made abortive attempts to get out, and we can get as far as Baldwin, at which point the roads become parking lots as everyone else tries to get to work/school (seriously, why are any schools open?)/etc.
* For my non-gamer friends: in Dungeons and Dragons and all of the systems based on it, rolling a 1 is a critical failure.
... which didn't work. They took Chris's 4-wheel-drive truck out to get a new battery (don't ask me why, I don't pretend to understand the setup).
... which didn't fix whatever the problem is.
Since the generator is a loan and not actually ours, we're a little hesitant to dump lots of money into trying to fix it. Plus, by that time it was dark, and trying to troubleshoot a generator with only a flashlight is something less than effective. It was agreed that we'd go out for dinner (yay hot food; the route to Big Boy was not fantastic, but it was mostly plowed) and then Chris and John would go buy a new generator.
... not on a Sunday evening after 6pm. Everyplace nearby that sells generators was closed.
A generator was obtained this morning, which is powering a very small subset of the house. We have to pick between heat and water (right now, we've picked heat), but there's enough to charge cell phones and give limited laptop internet access. The refrigerator and freezer are running, so we shouldn't lose any of the food. Once everything's heated and charged, we'll shut it all down and bring up the well pump, and see what sort of excess electrical capacity we have then.
In the meantime, I'm somewhat shocked at how unprepared we are for winter. Oh, John and Chris put a lot of effort into re-wiring the electrical panels so that a generator hooks in nicely to power the essentials, and that works very nicely. The only reason we have the heat vs water problem is that the only generator they could buy is smaller than the borrowed one by 2000 watts, and the re-wire project assumed a minimum of the borrowed generator's capacity. But for everything else? We don't have as many flashlights as we have people in the house. The dozen or so gallons of water I had stashed away the last time we had a power outage have disappeared; I don't know if they've been moved or discarded. I can't find the matches at all, and I can only find half the candles. I know we used to have some Wet Ones in the house, but I can't find those either. Extra blankets (which we fortunately did not need this time around) are stored in the basement rather than someplace accessible (the basement has zero windows, so no power means total darkness even in the middle of the day). Also, I am behind on laundry and am wearing my last pair of clean underwear.
Fortunately, this power outage is localized to us (we can see the downed line; it's on the parts of the pole that come up to our house from the street), so we can take advantage of friends... once the roads are plowed a little better and we can actually get somewhere. A couple of us have made abortive attempts to get out, and we can get as far as Baldwin, at which point the roads become parking lots as everyone else tries to get to work/school (seriously, why are any schools open?)/etc.
* For my non-gamer friends: in Dungeons and Dragons and all of the systems based on it, rolling a 1 is a critical failure.
