Another 24 hours without power. Basically, the storms this summer have been so violent that if the weather folks are predicting rain, I know I will be sans electricity for a day. The power just came back on and my house was a mild 87 degrees inside.
Looks like a generator is going to be my birthday/christmas present to myself this year.
cathyx
I’m sorry. I hate when that happens.
Raven
Man, sorry to hear that. How’s the critters and your family holding up?
Roger Moore
Have you given solar a serious thought? In my area, there are companies that will install panels on your roof for free and sell you the electricity for cheaper than power from the utility. Of course that’s in California, so there may be some extra tax incentives here that you can’t get out there.
Baud
That sucks, John. I feel for you.
Mnemosyne
When I get to Chicago tomorrow, it’s supposed to be 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity. Kill me now.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m trying to remember. Has an entire state ever completely lost its shit like Arizona?
cathyx
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good, I hope it gets a lot of press.
Litlebritdifrnt
A generator is the best thing that you could ever buy yourself. Really. You will not regret it. When Hurricane Irene came through here and basically tore everything to pieces my DH hooked up the generator and said “okay Woman cook me breakfast” LOL. I really had no excuse not to. It ran the a/c, my stovetop, the puters, and the lights. We were set. At Harbor Freight you can pick one up for $99.00. Worth every penny.
TaMara (BHF)
@Roger Moore: I’m with Roger on this. At least think about checking out the costs. Pretty please.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You mean outside of the 1860-1865 period?
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
On a national level, our power grid is a disgrace. And we’ll be stuck with it as long as modernization = communism.
hilzoy
Yeah; I’d check solar.
Also, for sheer comedic value, this. (“We are not burning a cross, look at the word is says it says light a cross,” Christian Identity Ministries Reverend Mel Lewis told WIAT. “If you light a light in your house do you burn down your house. We often use fire. Our ancient fathers said fire was a cleansing element. Even the Bible says the earth will be purified with fire what purer element can we use as a symbol of our worship.”)
hilzoy
And of course: glad the electricity is back.
Roger Moore
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
FTFY.
MikeJ
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): I’m reading Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us by Maggie Koerth-Baker and I find it amazing that the energy grid works at all.
Roger Moore
@hilzoy:
You must have a more robust sense of humor than I do. The rationalizations might be humorous if the underlying situation weren’t so scary.
Chris T.
@Roger Moore: I’m putting solar PV (and solar hot water) on my roof in the house re
modelbuild. The problem with using it to power the house when the grid is down, though, is that you then need batteries and a transfer switch.Of course, you need the transfer switch to power the house with a generator, too. But if you’re not set on that, you can use microinverters on the panels, and have an expandable system.
Just Some Fuckhead
Great, now you’ve ruined the surprise for you.
beltane
We had our 4th of July barbecue interrupted by a 70 mph wind that seemed to come out of nowhere. Luckily our power was only out for a short while though we did have some maples that were snapped in half.
Spaghetti Lee
I know a lot of people in Chicago had it out for 4-5 days after Sunday’s storm. I can’t even fathom that. We got ours back after about 40 hours, which was great-we didn’t even have to throw away a lot of food. And the DC/Virginia area’s got it even worse.
Like I said in another weather/power thread, sometimes freaky weather is just freaky weather, but can anyone else here remember a year when simple thunderstorms did so much damage? We’re not even talking hurricanes or tornadoes here.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
You know what you call a country where the well-off buy a generator for frequent power failures and everyone else suffers?
Third world.
So far our power failures haven’t driven me to a generator yet, although I’ve thought about using the car: plug an extension cord into an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter. Good for 150 watts or so.
jl
@hilzoy: Thanks. Is that pic at the top of one of their white pastors? Looks like they have some hell raisin’ congregations.
Cole: Rosie, turnwheel, generator. It will pay for itself, just like the blog does. Rosie will love it.
beltane
Trouble in wingnut paradise? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/us/politics/journal-critique-of-romney-shows-murdoch-doubt-on-candidacy.html
Why are there rumours popping up about Rupert Murdoch’s alleged dislike of Mitt Romney? It all seems a little bizarre to me.
Gus
@Mnemosyne: It’s similar here in Minneapolis. It was worse yesterday, though. I got out of work today expecting blast furnace, but it didn’t feel so bad. Turned on the radio and it was 96.
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The worst thing that happened to our state in recent memory was when the POTUS took away Napolitano to head up DHS.
Raven
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: I sold three 5kw Generators in a village in Korea in 1967 and bet they still have them suckers running. Cost me 2 stripes!
Cacti
@beltane:
Uncle Rupert knows a loser when he sees one.
No amount of cheating is going to drag that sad sack across the finish line.
Corner Stone
@Raven:
What does that translate to in currency of “long time” ?
Mike G
You shouldexpect the power to go out every now and then, it’s not like rain or heat are regular events.
It’s amazing how people adjust themselves to third-world-level unreliability in electricity. Because to criticize an American private electric utility corporation would be traitorous or communist or something.
amk
@jl: Shouldn’t that be the fat fucker, tunch ? It’s a win-win.
Corner Stone
Listen. I hate the corrupt system we have now. But the idiot TRMS just interviewed wants to have 3 or 4 reps for a congressional district?
Shit. We can’t get shit done now with one fucking vote. And this idiot who looks like local rabbits have been hiding him in their tunnels since Nirvana had their last hit is going to tell us he has a way to make things better?
BTW I hate Nirvana (the musical band). Overrated junkies.
Cacti
I remember in rural North Carolina in the early 90’s, after an ice storm, our power was out for 4 days. Good thing we were a middle class family and my folks could spring for a hotel room.
Cluttered Mind
What we really need is a way to convert bullshit into electricity. The FOX News building could power all five boroughs of NYC, and Manchin alone could probably fix Cole’s power problems. It would also make James Inhofe contribute positively to society for the first time in his wretched life.
Raven
@Corner Stone: Well, I was an E-4, busted to E-1. I finally made it back to E-4 when we shipped to Vietnam. Got busted for herb three weeks in and made it back to E-4 right before I ETS’d. FTA.
Steeplejack
I just got my power back on after six days out. Will refrain from duplicating my lengthy whine in the thread downstairs.
TaMara (BHF)
@Chris T.: Wow! That’s so cool.
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
happy to hear you are back to power.
On this end crazy busy day in that heat. Nice dinner, so-so spanish thriller on netflix.
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne: You’ve missed the worst of it. Three fucking days over a hundred counting tomorrow. It was 104 at 2:00 today when I checked.
Maude
Obama has talked about the power grid. The repubs don’t like that.
We have had strange lightning and thunder. The storms move around quickly.
It’s getting darker earlier, it’s noticeable.
Corner Stone
@Raven: So you had mad crazy sex overseas.
It’s ok, we’ll keep it on the DL here.
Poopyman
This three day outage was the final straw for Mrs. P. We’re at the very end of a long line, and were a low priority for our co–op. Looks like a 10 kw generator is in our future, too. Our problem is compounded by needing 40 amps to power the well for water.
@efgoldman: Tuesday morning we found a large limb on the locust right outside the kitchen had split and dropped right beside the house. Seems a lot of trees were damaged Friday night but didn’t immediately show it.
Brachiator
@Mike G:
We had brown outs in California not too long ago. It’s not just a third world thing.
Redshift
@Spaghetti Lee:
Yup. We were very lucky, and didn’t lose power at all, but most people I know were out at least overnight on Friday. My parents just got their power back mid-day yesterday. Fortunately, my mom was visiting my aunt in (nice cool) Vermont this weekend, and didn’t get back until Tuesday.
A little story to give you an idea of what it was like growing up with my dad. The family house is a big brick house built in the 30s, so it’s made to be somewhat comfortable without A/C. We had two window units. So, my dad was in the house without air conditioning for five days of temps in the mid to upper 90s. The power comes back on late in the morning on Wednesday. According to my mom, by mid-afternoon he had turned off the air conditioner because it was too cold.
TaMara (BHF)
Well you can look forward to much more of this:
Climate Change and ongoing weather issues
geg6
Sorry things have been so bad down there, Cole. Thankfully, the worst of it missed us but then it went on to hit you guys.
The weather, however, is just oppressive. Just awful. We’re hoping for 98F tomorrow and just tells you how awful it’s been. And, of course, the dog has chosen this week to have digestive problems with the resultant diarrhea. Did the weather cause it? Was it that unnamed thing he ate while in the yard the other day before I could stop him? Or is this another manifestation of his food allergies and ridiculously sensitive digestion system? Been giving him Pedialyte and Pepto, with purred pumpkin, rice, and boiled chicken breasts on deck if those work. Otherwise, it’s another trip to the vet. Damn, I just finished paying off the vet for his slipped disc and resulting physical therapy and also his allergy diagnosis. I adore my Otis, but he’s really been a financial burden the past couple of months. Between my dog and my car, I’m spending the summer completely and utterly broke.
scav
@Mnemosyne: We are so very very sorry about that. On top of everything else you’ve got going, walking out of O’Hare into the solid wall of hot. . . ai! At lease we on the ground here have had a little practice by now.
Amir Khalid
@Cacti:
But would Uncle Rupert publicly disavow Mitt, and lead an exodus of Republican billionaires to the sidelines? That would be as good as throwing the election to Obama. Worse, from the party’s point of view, it might break up the Teabagger/moneybagger coalition, such as it is, and split the party itself apart.
NJDave
After losing power for 6 days from Irene and then another 5 days from a freak October snow storm, we bit the bullet. We’d been looking at solar but in NJ, I wasn’t convinced that we’d get enough power for a 5-day shutdown. So we spent more than I wanted to (it IS NJ after all) and now have a unit that tests itself for 10 min. every Wed. and has come on 3 times since then. BTW, we have lousy power to begin with. There are frequent 20 min, 30 min outages, unrelated to the weather.
Best money we spent. With two active kids, we decided that power security was worth it.
Of course, where I grew up in rural PA the only times we were without power for more than 10 min. was when there was 3-4 ft of snow. And then it was for about an hour or so. (I know, the good ole days, get off my lawn, etc., etc.)
NJDave
Valdivia
Also, too. Hope you’re not midst black out again soon John. I think there’s another storm coming this weekend./ keeping fingers crossed.
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
Hope you didn’t get too hot out there. I had my energy sapped just from the short time I was out and about.
I forgot to ask you if you watched Montalbano this last Sunday. It was another good one, “Find the Woman.”
srv
John, just buy an old M-1A for the back yard and sit in it for the memories.
Cacti
@Amir Khalid:
If they keep at least 1 house of congress, they can still muck things up for Obama for the foreseeable future. He may consider Mittens a sunk cost at this point and wants to redirect the $$$ where it will make a difference.
The Dangerman
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
There was some Republican goob decrying the fact that we don’t have the power, at least in the main trunks, buried. There’s a really good reason for not doing so; it’s fucking expensive. Of course, it’s not like the emergency crews come cheap, but I’m sure it’s still far, far less than trenching (and, really, what Republican really gives a shit about a few deaths and massive discomfort of the masses?).
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
It was sweltering. I thought I was going to pass out every few minutes. But thankfully I was home after 3 so I missed the heavy afternoon heat.
I was so upset I didn’t see Montalba this weekend. I thought the changed the day to Monday somehow and missed it. I am not missing it this weekend!
Linda Featheringill
@BGinCHI:
Weather dot com says you should get some relief Sunday.
We’re usually about 2 to 3 days behind Chicago in weather systems. Hope it’s quicker this time.
maven
OK. I’m old and remember REA.
‘Electricity is penny cheap with NSP.’ Reddy Kilowatt.
Ya’ll all don’t even know.
Do some canning in July/August as a way of life; not a weekend course in Berkeley.
BTW; put down a batch of dills yesterday.
MikeBoyScout
Damn you Al Gore!
hamletta
James Fallows lives right outside DC, so he’s been going back and forth with readers about the outages. Pepco, the electric utility for DC and Maryland, has fucked up bad.
From what I can tell Pepco’s own outage maps show my mom still doesn’t have power, nearly a week after the storm.
Some libertarian wrote in and said, “Well, you just have to expect this and become more self-reliant! Buy a generator! Stock up on canned goods!” People from other countries —China, even! — were appalled.
Comrade Mary
Aw, man, John, that sucks. Are the tile floors and bathtubs still cool enough for you and the critters to take refuge on/in?
Meanwhile, it’s going to feel like 122F in Toronto tomorrow. I think I’ll just tattoo myself all over with titanium dioxide and be done with it.
Chris T.
@NJDave:
You’re not imagining this though.
There’s a saying in management: That which is measured, is managed. (This is also known as: Let’s teach to the test.)
Before deregulation became popular (in certain circles anyway) in the 1980s—i.e., from the time Federal laws were established in the 1930s, until deregulation started happening in the 1990s—electricity generation and distribution were, for the most part, treated as regulated monopolies. The regulations were done on the state level (which created some issues) but all states used essentially the same formula.
That formula was: power company proposes new power plants to accomodate new load, and requests rate increase; regulator looks at statistics for power company; regular grants increase, with dollar value of increase depending on price of power plants plus a margin, and that margin depending on the statistics.
So: what was the biggest, most important statistic? It was: minimizing the number of customer-hours without power. Have 50000 customers go out for a week and your future rate increases (and hence profits) will be miniscule. Keep it down to 10 customers for an hour and your future rate increases (and hence profits) will be huge.
Unsurprisingly, reliability, even in relatively rural areas, was wonderful. That was what was measured, so that was what was managed. Regulated monopoly utilities had armies of tree-trimmers inspecting and trimming.
Along comes deregulation, and with it, the separation of “generation” and “distribution” and tearing down all the old statistics. Profits now depend mainly on cutting costs, rather than increasing reliability. So that’s what they’re doing. It’s possible that “UDCs” (the “distribution” arms, which are still regulated monopolies) will get their profitability set based on reliability again, but unless and until that happens, tree-trimmer people are treated mainly as cost centers.
gogol's wife
@NJDave:
Very similar story here in Connecticut. What John has before him, though, is that everyone else will be trying to get a generator at the same time. It took me four solid months from the day I started on it to actually get the thing installed. And now I’m trying to find some reliable company to service it, since the one that installed it has gone AWOL.
lamh35
Can I just say that I luv Firestarter. Prob my fav Stephen King story to movie. “I Want My Daddy!!!’
trollhattan
@Chris T.:
Yeah, going from PV supplementing the grid to being a grid substitute, even an emergency substitute, is a huge jump. And let’s face it, the typical house has load potential so great it would take a massive amount of batteries to handle it.
Nevertheless, I’m very hopeful I’ll be able to install enough PV to keep us out of tier 2 entirely and perhaps generate a surplus in low-usage months. We got a smart meter last year and I’ve been pouring over the usage data, which are recorded hourly. Fascinating stuff for geek types.
Clearly, Cole needs coal power. Homegrown, baby.
Punchy
Maybe you should just move to a state that has power lines, power grids, and indoor plumbing.
Valdivia
So I see over at TPM Romney is really going to be off on some World Conquering Trip after the Olympics. What a fucking asshole.
PeakVT
@Comrade Mary: A heat index of 122F in TO? How is that possible?
NotMax
@Valdivia
Dollars to doughnuts he isn’t subject to an intrusive pat-down on the way to his Smiling For Dollars junket.
danielx
@hilzoy:
I have to ask; did you write previously at Obsidian Wings a while back? If so, really enjoyed your posts. More, please.
Valdivia
@efgoldman:
it’s now a trip to Poland (New Europe!) and maybe Germany where he plans to talk about
winning the Cold WarAmerica’s Foreign Policy@NotMax: I am sure!
Chris T.
@trollhattan: Yes, I went with microinverters because I’m starting small and want to expand the PV system eventually, and also because they use cheap wiring (vs the expensive, heavy duty high-current DC wiring you need for 10+ kW of DC-to-one-big-inverter). At about $4000/kW (my end-user installed price with someone else doing all the work—I know nothing about wind loading and tying panels into roofing and so on), about 3 kW of panels was all I could squish into the budget now. :-)
NotMax
@Valdivia
And if he peeks his head into the stall to see if Ann’s Olympic horse is still there, the whole thing can be written off as a business expense.
Ka-ching.
danielx
I almost, repeat almost, wish that we’d have at least some storms. When it’s 97 or higher for days on end, people get tetchy on top of having to watch everything turning into tinder. But since they seem to get more severe every time…with derecho seeming to be the word de jour.
Valdivia
@NotMax:
I think it has already been pre-deducted as some sort of business expense. He is a walking business expense, as are his kids and his wife. Ugh.
NotMax
If I had any skill whatsoever as an artist, would dash off a cartoon of Mitt in Germany.
“I love it here. The swastikas are just the right height.”
Valdivia
@NotMax:
ha ha ha. Fantastic. Thanks for the laugh.
NotMax
From late June, Fred Kaplan slices and dices Mitt’s foreign policy stances:
Why Romney Is a Foreign Policy Lightweight
His ideas range from vague to ill-informed to downright dangerous.
Comrade Mary
@PeakVT: It is very, very possible. We are a pretty big midwestern city, and our downtown and environs makes an AWESOME heat sink that outweighs any cooling effect from the big-ass lake we crouch beside.
We had pretty brutal weather last summer, too. Toronto has always been pretty hot and sticky in the summer, but the past decade we’ve seen more and more heat alerts and a general sense of living up a dog’s ass.
Because I am stubborn, I’ll be cycling out 10 km in the morning downtown to work, and 10 km back in the evening. With any luck, the city will have cleaned up the exploded dead raccoon in the middle of Davenport by the time I leave tomorrow. I do not want to know what a damn near inverted dead raccoon smells like after 24+ hours in this weather.
Bobby Thomson
@hilzoy: A little more than a wheel in the ditch.
Maude
@Comrade Mary:
Probably like a bloated deer.
Comrade Mary
@Maude: Or a pig lizard.
Hypatia's Momma
@Roger Moore:
At least a a solar-powered generator would keep the beer cold.
MattF
Ah, finally, my DSL line came back. Out since Friday night, I’d gotten very tired of browsing on my phone. Yeah, it’s a technological miracle, but it also kinda sucks, IMO.
eclare
Hey I’m here in Memphis, and even with power, I’m trying to get my house below 84. But of course global warming doesn’t exist. Just checked the unit, at 10 something at night, it’s 83 in here.
Xenos
@Valdivia:
WTF? He never heard about Martha Coakley?
This sort of thing sets up a narrative dynamic that he can not win. Obama is going to drop so many attacks on him when he is out of the country that the story will be about how he had to come running back into the country ahead of schedule to deal with it. Or that he failed to come back when he needed to deal with it.
slag
I suppose it’s probably crazy to wonder if there might be a decent hotel around there that has power and will take the menagerie? If there is, I would weigh costs and benefits taking that option into account. If there isn’t, I would weigh costs and benefits of moving to someplace civilized.
JWL
Watching weather reports of the rest of the country (from Sonoma, Ca.) is like watching a furnace burn.
Let’s nationalize our energy system.
By November.
And fuck Obama if he can’t get it done.
Odie Hugh Manatee
We have a Honda 5 KW generator that gets pulled out when the power goes out. It has enough power to keep what we need running with some to spare. We also have another Honda 1 KW generator for camping and a secondary that we have loaned to neighbors if needed.
Luckily we don’t need to worry about the air conditioning here if there’s a power outage since summer hasn’t found its way here yet. It got up to a balmy 59 today. We’re expecting a real scorcher tomorrow, 66!
I think we made it into the 70’s once last month. Damned global warming, hurry up already! ;p
Dave Trowbridge
If our experience is any guide, once you have a natural gas generator with auto failover, you’ll wonder how you managed without it. We got one in 2004 (we live in Boulder Creek, CA, in the middle of a redwood forest, and average 3 days a year off the grid), and now power failures only last 10 seconds.
But be sure to pay for ongoing maintenance–that gets you priority when your generator goes down. And you’ll want it!
Kyle
@hamletta:
Proving that no matter how egregious, whenever a powerful corporation fucks up big, a libertard stands ready to jump to their defense and blame the victims, even when the libertard is one of them.
jak
Go for the generator and don’t skimp. Figure out what you need and then add a little spare capacity. And get a service contract. They will change the oil and keep tabs on the battery.
Appalachian Power just got the power restored here. 2 hours short of 6 days on the generator (Generac 16kw). Saved all the food in the refrigerator and freezer. No a/c though, that’ll take a larger generator or giving something else up.
Mino
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): That should be a campaign promise from both candidates. We’ve only needed a serious upgrade for at least 15 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages
Of course, Texas has her own grid, so don’t expect anything on that front.
Mino
Jesus Christ! Can we just erase every law passed by Congress since 1970? We seem to have only gone from bad to worse.
Lee
There is actually a pretty simple to solution to many of the power outages.
Bury the low and medium volt lines.
The suburb where I live (North Texas) that is the common practice. I’ve had two power outages in 12 years. One was storm related, the other construction related.
The problem is you have to have your local government onboard with requiring it (ours is).
Cermet
Get an easy to move gasoline generator (4000 – 4500 watt with wheels. Pull to start for this size.) Then buy a small, cheap (5000 BTU) air conditioner (less than $100.) The small AC can go in a room that you have a computer in. The generator powers frig/computer/AC/lights and uses less fuel than the larger units. What I did (I do have a 8000 watt semi-portable, electric start for the water pump and AC.)
gelfling545
@Cacti: Are you sure that this isn’t a subtle plot to make Romney seem more likeable because Rupert the Despicable hates him?