Black-out contingency plans.

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toggleswitch

toggleswitch

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One of my fascinations is to be prepared for a long-term blackout, since someone knocked down the twins a few years back.

COOKING:
Although I live in a gas market, and most here cook with gas, I now prefer electric cooking. But I do have a small AVANTI brand Turkish stove as a back-up (Easy grandpa, stop rolling over in your grave.) Unlike most gas stoves avaailable here, all burners (broiler and oven as well) can be used in a black-out. SOLD. It has a "clicker" sparker for when there IS electricity. The oven knob needs to be held in until igntion is "proved"

HOT WATER:
In an ideal world I would have a GAS hot water heater in that IIRC both storage and instantaneous types are non-electric.

HEAT:
Gas fired steam heat can be converted to a mili-volt system that is non-electric. [My system is oil-fired so that can't happen.] There are non-electric gas wall-furnaces (as found in California) mounted betwen std 16 inch o.c. studs. There are also gas console heaters that sit on the floor as well.

APPLIANCES:
for this a small natural-gas fired generator would suffice. W, D, DW, water pump, sump-pump, ref, freezer and TV/radio
oh and lights as well.

Anyone else have any other thoughts on preparedness?
 
AVANTI Gas stoves- no electricity required.

AVANTI 20inch wide electric smooth-tops (vitro-ceram.)
Hard to find here to date in this size.

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Natural gas gensets-If the power outage is really bad-could affect the delivory of the gas to your home-Natural gas compresser stations don't always run on their own gas as fuel(the compresser stations pump the gas thru the pipelines to your home-or wherever else the gas is to be used)A genset that could run on "dual Fuel" would be best-same with other appliances.so if the natural gas supply in your area is knocked out-your gen and other gas using appliances could still function.since floyd-I have spotted many nat gas or propane gensets at homes in this area.the unit is large enough where it could run the household-in fact these units are sold thru Lowes and home Depot in this area-would figure they are available in other places as well.The dual fuel would be like nat gas or propane.You would have a supply of the propane stored in the tank.You would have to "ration" that so you don't run out quickly.Any delivored utility could be affected by a bad power outage or disaster.-that would include water,electricity,phone,cell phone,nat gas,cable TV.
 
I have a travel trailer, and it's already proven itself when Hurrican Isabel hit here. We were without power for 2 weeks. the camper has a 6cu/ft gas fridge, along with a 3-burner gas stove with oven. It also has a gas fired furnace that does not require electricity to operate. The camper also has 2 6-volt golf car batteries wired in series for 12 volts. Those batteries store about 250 amp-hours of juice that can power all sorts of 12 volt stuff like the 12 volt flurorescent lighting, video/DVD/audio system, fans for summertime cooldown, etc. There's also a 1200 watt inverter on board to provide 120 volt AC power. The batteries are recharged by either plugging the camper into a running tow vehicle (my Astro-van) or with a 100 watt solar panel I recently installed on the roof. Obviously, retreating into the camper during an outage is the way to go.

There's still the issue with showering however. During Hurricane Isabel, I went over to the gym and showered in the locker room!

I still need to keep the house warm to prevent pipes breaking and such, so I've got a kerosene heater I can use for that if needed. I used to use this heater for daily heating when Kero prices were $.79 a gallon. A that point, it was much cheaper to burn than the electric heat pump...not anymore though, but I've still got it for emergency purposes.

I have noticed a few errors in generator installations around here that many people have done. One of the biggest is attempting to operate heating appliances with them. Generators are at best only about 25% efficient at converting the fuel's energy into electricity. Most of the energy is lost as heat out the exhaust stack, or the radiator. Many people size these generators to power heat pumps, stoves, etc. which is a real waste. The problem with this is that it consumes an ENORMOUS amount of propane (or fuel oil if you have a diesel) even when the generator is not fully loaded, it still consumes lots of fuel. The proper solution to the problem would be to install a propane heater in the house, use a gas stove for cooking, and a gas water heater. Since you already have the propane on site to run the generator, you might as well install these products to run off the tanks. The money you save in installing a SMALLER generator will more than pay for the new propane heating appliances, and your wallet will also thank you after the power comes back on, and it's time to refill the tanks!

Still, after I've seen the prices of some of the backup generators, I am not so sure they are the way to go period! A neighbor just had one installed that cost close to $12,000!!!! That's insane! I usually don't keep any more than about $50 worth of food on hand at any given time, and the rest of the stuff is a matter of convenience. Proper planning can go a long ways and save enormous amounts of money on a backup system.

A solar system however seems to be the right way to go if you really need a backup power system. For about the same cost as a backup generator, a solar energy system can be installed in a home that will store power in large batteries. When the batteries are filled up, power is fed back into the grid, saving you money off the top of your electric bill. When the power goes out, the batteries power your house! Instead of costing you money to run and maintain, it MAKES you money!!!
 
Rent a movie called "The Trigger Effect". A Hollywood thriller of course, but it brings up some interesting points to think about should there be an extended loss of utility service and a very likely breakdown of social order. It won't be just electricity and cooking we'd have to worry about.

www.imdb.com

The Trigger Effect (1996) - Plot - IMDb

The Trigger Effect (1996) - Plot summary, synopsis, and more...
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com
 
You hate to invest around ten grand for a home generator that you pray that you would not need. On the other hand, it is a royal pain to live without electricity when so much of our life is supported by devices that depend on it for energy. When I moved into this area, I checked the Yellow Pages for dry ice providers. The neighborhood where John and I live has has two major blackouts: the tornado two weeks after 9/11/01 and the fringe of a hurricane a couple of years ago when the wind gusted so high that it tossed power lines against themselves and other things so that they shorted out with big blue and green flashes. After the tornado, I phoned a dry ice plant in Baltimore and drove up to buy about 150 lbs for John's & my refrigerators & freezers. I paid a fraction of the price a dealer closer to us was charging. When the hurricane came through, a much larger area lost power, so I drove up the day before to buy the ice, before the ice plants lost electricity. While that assured us of having ice, it also meant that we were using/losing it before we really needed it. On the last day of the hurricane aftermath, John's warehouse (which also houses the museum) had power restored several hours before our houses did, so we ran the most perishable foods over there where there are refrigerators & freezers in operation for testing after repairs or rebuilding. We both were able to have our homeowners' policies pop for the ice since our losses of food would have been far more costly. With a gas water heater and and the electrically-independent hydronic heating system that heats an addition, I could hunker down with a sleeping bag placed near the baseboard radiators and stay warm and have hot water for bathing, etc., but I would only have a few hours of battery power for my home security system, the importance of which Greg's link brought to mind.

I have looked at 11 to 15 kw LP or natural gas generators because of these incidents and the huge blackouts when parts of the grid failed. With the deregulation of the energy utilities, it is unlikely that power companies that have split into power generating companies and power transmission companies are going to do much to improve things unless forced and I would prefer to somehow mitigate the effects of an outage severe enough to cause our hands-off government to force action. Also, I remember the ice storms we had in Georgia where the pine needles quickly became coated in ice and brought limbs and trees down on the power lines. If the climate is changing, colder winters with snow as the usual form of percipitation, might be replaced with the types of winters we had further south where ice was seen more than snow. I guess that summer storms might increase in ferocity and tropical storms might become more of a problem for us. I have a backup gas stove under the deck next to the gas dryers for drying in the warm months and have used the stove a couple of times to boil water for tea during power outages. I would like to have the capacity to have refrigeration and a small window air conditioner operating, along with a cord to each neighbor so that they could keep food cold and have some light at night. So far, we have not had a power outage so severe that it interrupted gas service, but in the early 90s, we had a cold snap where businesses and most government offices were closed down to save gas. During that time, there were homes at some point near the end of a pipeline that had pressure drop so low that the gas company came in, shut off gas service and ordered the homes evacuated. We have also had winter weather where the usual snow combined with temperatures cold enough and lasting long enough that the coal for the PEPCO generating plants, froze in the open coal cars lined up all over the region. The cars had to be pulled into locations where the coal could thawed so that it would fall when the chutes were opened. That was when we were faced with rolling blackouts if power consumption was not curtailed and commercial buildings were closed.

So I think Toggle is showing good judgement in thinking of ways to prepare for an eventual emergency. It is like the saying: proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance. The time to prepare for anything is before you have to face it. We have many threats to our usual and taken-for-granted daily routines. Some are new, some have been around for a long time. Thank heaven most of us do not have to chop wood to stay warm, On the other hand, many people live where chopped wood would not help them stay warm. We are fortunate to have, in this group, people with technical knowledge and abilities that can help us prepare for extreme events so that we can be better prepared for life's bumps in the road and help us to help one another.
 
Interesting that this should come up now. At this very moment I'm living with "half electricity." The other day I turned on the electric heater in the bathroom before getting in the shower, and *blink!* the lights went off. Or more accurately, half the lights went off: no power in the bathroom, bedroom, and half the kitchen. There were no blown fuses in the fuse box. I had to scoot off to a client site so there was no time to check further.

The next day I did check, outside at the main disconnect, and found one of the two large mains fuses blown (verified with voltage and resistance tests). Now quite frankly I'm a wimp about sticking my hands into mains boxes, even with the cutoff switch turned off, and especially with the rain we've had lately. So this has had to wait and will have to wait until next week when a more courageous coworker is willing to come over and do it.

Meanwhile I'm living with "half electricity." Fortunately I have one of those "kill-a-watt" plug-in power meters, so I can watch my loads carefully and keep them to a minimum.

The fridge works, as does the microwave. The home office infrastructure works, i.e. computers and phone system. These are the only circuits I have active right now. So I'm running everything else off those circuits, taking extreme care to keep the loads light.

I can wash clothes in the twin tub (27 to 200 watts depending on cycle), but to be safe, since the only nearby outlet isn't grounded, I do this the "old fashioned way": loading the fresh water from a bucket filled from a hose at the sink, and discharging the used water into buckets that get manually emptied into the sink. Thus, no contact between the washer and the water pipes & sink, the former being "hot" and the latter being "ground." While washing clothes, the fridge (350 watts when running) gets unplugged to minimize load on that circuit.

I have an extention cord to the bedroom which powers a choice of one 15-watt fluorescent and a computer in the bedroom (total about 60 watts) or one 60-watt incandescent and the clock radio and white noise system, the latter two together being about one watt (total about 61 watts). I have a "trouble light" (incandescent) on a long cord, with which to light the bathroom or kitchen but not both at the same time. 75 watts. The stove & oven, of course, aren't being used for the duration, but this is not a big deal since the microwave will suffice.

Whilst taking a shower, I can run the trouble light (75 watts), and the attic fan (100 watts) and a small portable fan (15 watts) for exhausting humidity from the bathroom. There is no more use of the heater, as even the low setting is 500 watts and I don't want to risk blowing the remaining main line fuse.

Needless to say all of these minor adjustments are a bit annoying. But they do make for a constant reminder of how important electricity is, and how much care one needs to take to use it safely.

As far as major disaster preparedness goes: Late in 2005 I looked at an earthquake map of the Bay Area. In the next 20 years there is a 67% probability of a quake of magnitude 7.2. In the "violent shaking zone" it will knock down about 40% of the buildings, and this turns out to be the entire Bay Area from Hayward to Vallejo, including where I am located in the Oakland area. The solution to that is obvious: Move the hell out of here before it happens. This I am going to do within the next year or at most two years.
 
fuse tong

for those cartridge fuses-even though NEC codes require them to be "dead front" when the switch is thrown off-(the fuses aren't "hot")you can get a tool known as a fuse puller or fuse tong a plastic tong like tool designed to pull fuses.Most major electrical suppliers have them.Its a good thing to have-you can pull and install fuses safely-I have used fuse tongs quite a lot-transmitter disconnects have the cartrdige fuses along with other equipment.I used one here at work a week ago to change a fuse in the 220V switch that feeds a transmitter dummy load.
 
the area where I live is mainly forest. It is not uncommon for the power to be cut when storms blow tree branches into the powerlines. Frequently in the morning when I walk to the shop to get the paper, the locals are all talking about how long the power was off last night, it's just not good enough and so on. Many of these folks have lived here for generations yet are completely dependant on mains power. (ironic as grid power only came to this town in the early sixties.) They can't even boil a kettle or have a shower as everything is electric, even water pumps.
My house runs from solar, we have four 50 watt panels and two 120 watt panels on the roof, a 24 volt 500 amp hour battery bank (ex-government cells dated 1970 and still surviving) and a 1500 watt inverter. A few loads run directly off a DC converter which makes 12v DC off the 24v battery bank, such as cordless phone, fans in the wood heater, a radio and tiny TV in the kitchen, and TV signal booster. Everything else runs off the inverter, if any appliance uses more than 1500 watts I just don't have it in the house. So we have no dryer, no dishwasher, no electric heating of any kind except for a 900 watt electric kettle which we use in summer when we have more solar power than we know what to do with. The fridge runs off lpg, it is an ancient Electrolux. We have lpg and wood stoves in the kitchen, lpg and wood heaters in the lounge, kerosene heater in the bathroom. Hot water is solar with boosting from the wood stove. For times when we aren't getting enough sun, we have a home made generator which uses a truck alternator to produce 24v to recharge the batteries. In winter it gets used for between half and one hour per day. Mostly in summer it doesn't get used at all, though we are having all seasons at present - two days ago we had uncomfortably hot weather, today we had cold and rain even though it is mid summer. So we had half an hour of genny today- maybe $1 worth of petrol. The new house will be mostly the same, though it is much better designed, follows passive solar design principles, we are very happy to be finding it really works, on cold days it is pleasantly warm inside and on hot days it stays cool inside, with no heating or cooling installed at all. (It will have a wood heater but that isn't in yet..)

Anyway, go solar Toggle. No power bills, no blackouts. (well except when the silly husband turns on the vacuum cleaner (700w) when the vintage frigidaire washer is still getting up to spin (2400 watts surge till motor gets up to speed) ... Fortunately no damage is done, a circuit breaker just clicks off on the inverter, though finding the breaker in a dark cupboard when the lights have just gone off was an ordeal itself...

Chris.
 
Irish perspective

I'm in an urban area, so in general, as most of the supply network is underground, the weather can do its worst and the power stays on.

However, a couple of years ago on Christmas eve we had a big storm. A neighbour's tree blew over, pulling down the old overhead supply line that feeds their house. It obviously blew a local fuse on a transformer somewhere as the whole street went out. (it's a small street)

Anyway, the storm apparently did severe network damage in rural areas where overhead distribution lines (10kV, 20kV and 38kV) had come crashing down and the power company was rather busy. As our street only has 5 houses on it, we wern't exactly high priority. So, we'd no power until late Christmas day!

It made me realise how vunerable we are without electricity though.

No light
No heat (even though it's gas-fired)
No hot water (gas or electric)
No cooking (electric)

The gas boiler (furnace) is pretty heavily dependent on its electronics and fans. The central heating is hydronic (water circulated through radiators by pumps)
Same furnace also provides heat to the hotwater tank.
Electric waterheater in the tank obviously doesn't work without power.

The ovens are electric and the hob (Cooktop) uses electromagnetic induction, so no hope there :)

Anyway, we had to cook our turkey and ham in a friends place. Brought it back, had a large open fire blazing in the fire place. Got out all the ancient candle sticks, candle holders, etc and had a good old victorian style Christmas.

I was nearly disappointed when the recessed lighting in the kitchen suddenly came back on at around 9pm that evening.

-----

Those fuses sound scary! We have nothing quite like that to deal with, thankfully!

Normal layout here:

230V 50Hz 2-wire feed comes into the property (fuse is on the pole or in the distribution box on the street and controlled by the power company)

Goes into a meter cabnet located outside where it passes through another fuse (sealed and owned by the power company) then through their meter.

The customer only has responsibility for equipment after that point.

So, on the panel in the house you'd have a main isolating switch, a main fuse (rated at the maximum for that panel e.g. 100Amps)This is usually a "minized" fuse which is extremely easy to change. You just flip it down and it isolates itself and the fuse can be removed safely.

After that, it's horizontal rows of breakers for the final circuits. Modern installations (post 1980) have to include RCD protection (GFCI) for all outlets, this is done on the panel itself.

Overall, it's all neat and tidy and doesn't require scary fuse pullers! :)

Below: A typical boringly safe European panel:
 
Oh yeah forgot

We typically have 80A to 100A 230V 50Hz supply services. However, it's worth noting that unlike the USA we don't need air conditioning as the climate's way too mild and temperate.

Air conditioning's generally only installed in offices / commercial buildings where large amounts of electrical equipment (i.e. computer equipment) or large numbers of people may require it.

Where it is installed, it usually runs on 3-phase power too. i.e. 400V 50Hz fed with 3 hots + neutral.

Electric heating's not too popular as the price of gas and other fuels is way more attractive.
In large homes with electric heating (very rare) 3-phase may also be used.
 
Tolivac, thanks for the item re. fuse pullers. I'm going to get one ASAP and hand it over to my coworker so he can do the deed.

It will be a wonderful thing when those presently-dead circuits come back to life, no more pesky extension cords trailing all over the place (yes, I know, fire hazard too, that's one of the reasons I watch the loads carefully on the plug-in meter).

Gizmo, you're ahead of the curve, producing your own power. In a few years I hope to be similarly situated, though with a grid connection (think of the grid as similar to the internet: upload power when you're producing excess, and download power when you're not producing enough). What we really need in California is to develop all of our available wind sites (I can think of about five right now) and at the same time build about six new nuclear plants (and I would gladly live next to either or both). That plus solar thermal on all new house construction, and smarter transportation planning, and we might do OK.
 

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