Power outage second night in a row

[unicornduke]

 Last night's was from 11pm to 5am so I slept through it mostly. Tonight's went out at 8pm and I'm just going to bed again. I did pull the emergency bin out and got the battery lanterns to welcome my housemate back home when she got back. Ah well. We have plenty of water and the crew is apparently working on it. It's the whole neighborhood and the weather isn't terrible.

ETA: power was back around 1am

Comments

[ranunculus]

It is times like that when I think about how to set my place up pretty much off the grid. Then I think of the time it would take to pay back the investment.

Of course out local utility supplier PG&E, yes that PG&E the one that took such shitty care of their equipment that they had gas mains blow up and kill people, power lines torch off multiple huge fires that killed people and burned thousands of homes. Well now that company is putting rates up to pay for it all. I only need about 60 amps to run this place with everything turned on. Most of the time I can run it on less than 20 amps. The only real energy hog is the kitchen stove and the occasional table saw/ power tool use. Hmmm. Maybe I should get a gas stove and put some solar panels up. Water is gravity feed from springs, hot water is propane and heat is wood.

[unicornduke]

We are definitely going to change how we do some things, it is just going to be an upfront investment. Right now we have a really efficient heater/boiler that runs on propane but if the power is out, it won't work since it's electric start. But we do have all these woods so the next investment will be a wood stove so we can heat the house with wood we cut and chop ourselves. Unfortunately we are in a bad spot for solar panels, the low spot of the property and the whole thing is a north facing slope so it doesn't make sense that way for us. Since it's winter, the highest priority is keeping the house warm enough that the pipes don't freeze, so obviously the wood stove and our current backup is an indoor propane heater. But it's been right around freezing the last two nights so I'm not worried about it at this moment

I may also look into re-arranging the heating pipes in the basement since those are on the outer wall that faces to the air outside and while it makes sense to heat those, they are going to be the first to burst if things go wrong.

We also have a generator and generator switch in the house but haven't had time yet to figure out how it's wired up. It's definitely higher on the priority list now.

I think it's less about going off-grid for us and more about hedging our bets on problems since we are out there a bit. We haven't had bad ice storms yet (*knocks on wood*) but if we do and trees start coming down on lines, we'll be low on the priority list.

[graydon]

Insulation? (rent an IR camera and find the leaks?)

How deeply buried is the water line from the well into the house? (The house line never froze on us when I was a kid, but the barn line did, rather memorably. It needed to be a lot deeper than it had been installed.)

Thermal battery/heat exchanger/heat pump? They're getting more and more efficient, and you're in a position to swap some room for cost with heat storage. A "reduce the heating and cooling bills" more than a "whups no power" fallback.

A large battery of some kind is getting increasingly practical as a house power conditioner; charge at night, house power feeds from it all the time.

[graydon]

Hope your power is back on!

Several rounds of that awful sleet-on-the-roof sound here overnight, but it's looking like it was more rain than ice out the window this morning. Hope you've managed to miss all or most of that.

[unicornduke]

Power is back! Looks like it came back around 1am. We'll be having ice/rain grossness coming through and we've got a winter storm warning starting around noon and going until noon tomorrow so we've yet to see any of it. I think the power thing is unrelated to any weather, but I'm not sure what the problem is.