Power Outages-

[fan-of-fans]

It's kind of odd, because we used to have power outages almost every other day during the summer when we'd get severe thunderstorms. They would last for hours.

But these days it's rare we get an outage at all. At most the power will blink off for a second. Several years ago our utility went around and replaced most of the transformers, and I think that fixed part of the problem.

At work we'll sometimes get an outage that lasts an hour or so, but they're usually due to cars knocking down a pole somewhere.

 

[rolls_rapide]

Petrol going off

I've heard of that too, but thought is was as follows:

I have heard that during winter, you should keep the car's petrol tank reasonably full (i.e. not empty dregs), because of moisture condensate, which causes water to collect in the tank.

I suppose it's like a box of matches getting damp. Becomes useless.

 

[wayupnorth]

Problem with gasoline now is the ethanol content that will gum up the carbs in small engines when gas sits for a month or more. Stabilizers for gas help some. There are a few stations selling non-ethanol gasoline that I use for all my small engines for a buck more a gallon but worth it.

 

[perc-o-prince]

Ethanol

When I picked up the Mantis tiller from the repair shop I let the guy know my routine at the end of use for the year- add Sta Bil and run for 5 minutes or so to have it get everywhere. He said it will help, but it's best to either run the unit dry or use high-octane fuel without ethanol. I'm leery about running them dry- anyone do this?

Chuck

 

[DADoES]

 
Running to-dry (after every use) ... that's what I was told to do with my Stihl line trimmer and a push-mower that is used only to mow the deep FM ditches (when they're not wet from rains).

 

[sfh074]

I run mine ....

dry at the end of the season. Been doing it forever since my dad did the same thing with his tools.

 

I use ethanol free gas and spend the extra buck a gallon for it. I also mix Stabil in with it.  Doing this has kept the primer bulbs and fuel lines soft. Can't remember the last time I had to replace clear fuel lines or bulbs. 

 

At the end of the season I'll crank and run the unit for a few minutes to get it warm. Then turn it off and pour out any remaining fuel. I then crank it again and run it with 3/4 throttle until it runs dry.  I have never had any problems starting the next spring ..... and I have probably a dozen tools with gas engines.

 

[mattl]

Run dry here too...

 

[dalangdon]

In thirty years of living in Seattle, I can count the number of outages on one hand. The Inauguration Day windstorm of 1992, the Hanukkah Eve windstorm of 2006, and one weird microstorm that hit our neighborhood with lighting and took out about twenty transformers. Other parts of town are more prone to outages, but we live in the central part of the city.

With that said, I work for the power company, so I am familiar with outages. It seems like whenever there is an outage, everyone just filled their freezer. ;-)

If it were worth the investment, I would get solar with some of those Tesla power walls. (That allows the solar to keep functioning in the event of an outage). But the infrequency of outages, combined with our low rates, just doesn't pencil out.

When the power has gone out, I haven't done anything special (partly because I'm usually called into work). The nice thing about having elderly appliances is that they ride through outages pretty well. They can be rough on solid state stuff. We had a situation a few years back where a transmission line fell on a distribution line. That blew out gobs of customer equipment, but the old stuff just shook it off.

 

[sudsmaster]

Seems like the gas problem here has gotten worse over the past few years. Such as having to replace carbs on small garden engines.

 

[volsboy1]

One advantage of having a house near Chattanooga ever sense they installed Fiber to the home for all houses and business.They installed it for power switching during outages in 2009 but it has dual uses as very FAST and Very cheap internet.I pay 69 bucks a month for a 1 Gig of speed and 10 gigs cost 200 bucks a month I think.
Power rarely goes out here for more than a minute.Then comes back on.
The last time it was out for a long time was in 2011 when we had Tornadoes destroy everything. That was the last time my parents Generac ran for more than a hour.
Now the at farm where we don't have Fiber optics the power goes out frequently
a few times a year and takes hours and hours.We have a very large Yanmar diesel Generator up there being a working farm for the Milk refrigeration.My Brother who works for Oak ridge labs told me that other cites are wanting to install a Fiber optics system like Chattanooga but that Comcast is putting up road blocks at every chance they get.

 

[kb0nes]

Gas problem getting worse

Not sure it has changed a lot recently, but there was an awful turn for the worse as soon as they mixed Ethanol with the gas. It isn't really a problem in frequently run engines where the fuel doesn't age but infrequently run engines have horrible luck. From what I have found there is NOTHING you can add to the fuel that makes up for the alcohol being in it. Hopefully we don't end up with higher percentage blends but I'm not sure they could be any worse.

In many parts of the country it isn't tough to get non-oxygenated Ethanol free gasoline. I've been using non-oxy gas for about 6 years now and I no longer do anything special. I used to use Stabil and drain tanks for the off season etc. I rarely run my lawn mower so the fuel in the tank is now about 2 years old, I start it every couple months first or 2nd pull every time. Snowblower started last weekend first pull on last years gas. I've never had a single fuel related problem since I switched.

Check the link for a list of gas stations that carry non-oxy fuel

https://www.pure-gas.org/

 

[davetranter]

Thanks for the replies

I managed to log in on Sunday evening, and read the posts mentioning 'Sta-Bil' and similar additives, then spent the rest of the evening and into the night reading up on stabilisers and the sub-standard, ethanol rich petrol/gasoline which we are now having foisted upon us. As far as I know, here in the UK, there is no option to buy 'straight' gasoline anywhere... Unless I can get a few gallons of aviation grade fuel from an airfield. You never know, that might turn my mower into a REAL 'fly-mow' ;-)

I will be checking on the availability of fuel stabilisers in this country at the weekend, and will post on what I find.

The depth and diversity of knowledge available within this group never ceases to amaze me!!

Thanks to all again!

Dave T

 

[perc-o-prince]

Oddly, some engines have issues and others don't. Our lawn rider, snowblower and backpack blower- no issues with a start-of-season start using regular unleaded and Sta Bil. Tiller, weed-wacker, Mantis mini-tiller, generator... not easy. 

 

I think I'll try running them dry this year, but maybe run them dry, add a little race fuel, and run them dry again to be sure there's no ethanol in them.

 

Chuck

 

[qsd-dan]

I've used Seafoam as a fuel stabilizer/cleaner since 1997. The lawnmower is 24 years old and the 4 stroke weed eater turned 20 this year. Other than new primer bulbs (one for the lawnmower, 2 for the weed eater), none of the carbs have been touched and never had any issues. They have been through MTBE, ethanol, and whatever political scam California loves to embrace with open arms. 1 ounce per a gallon treats fuel for up to 2 years although I can't remember going much longer than 5-6 months on the same gas.

Running the carb dry using ethanol fuel is a not a guaranteed fix. I recently borrowed my neighbors tiller that he ran dry and stowed away for almost a year. I couldn't get it run longer than a few seconds and ended up rebuilding the carb since individual gaskets were more expensive than a complete rebuild kit. It was a mess inside there.

There's a goofball small engine repair guy on Youtube who's currently testing different fuel stabilizers on a monthly basis. His experimentation began at the start of the year and now approaching month 10. One of them has already failed. There should be a new video out within the next few days but here's the last one for the month of September.

 

[wayupnorth]

Power is out again in nearly all the state due to another windstorm, many trees down, roads closed. My Generac is humming away nicely.

 

[mattl]

BAH!

Power went out again last night, but this time with damage.  Went out about 11:10pm  but it "Bounced" 2 or 3 times.  I knew that would be trouble.  Came on a couple of hours later and everything looked good until I went to my main computer.    Got a warning message: Could not find Kernel - never a good thing.  After an hour of messing with it decided I had no option but rebuild.  I had bought a SSD a few months ago but was dragging my feet reinstalling my main system.  SO 20 minutes later I had a new system up and running, Linux Mint 20 on an SSD loads VERY quickly. 

 

Tested the 4 other dives in the system all OK, but my 1T drive with my OS was dead.  My hope is it blew the controller board since it's not even spinning up.  I can swap out the hard drive controller board for $35, cheap fix to recover all the stuff I had not backed up.  I do keep my data on a second drive separate from the main OS drive, but it will be a pain to recover.

 

[fan-of-fans]

Forgot about the hurricanes

Our power always is out a minimum of one week after a storm comes across Florida.

2004 when we had Charley, Frances and Jeanne, I believe we were out for about two weeks after the first two of those.

It gets really HOT in Florida in the middle of summer, and it seems after the hurricanes pass there are NO breezes. It's almost unbearable when you're used to air conditioning.

After that we avoided about 13 summers of hurricanes until Irma came in 2017. We were off for about a week and a half here. What was weird about Irma was parts of downtown had power within a day or two, traffic lights in those parts were working, etc.

My area is almost always one of the last ones to get power back, and this time was no different. The main transmission lines were down which prevented us from even getting power here. Lineman's work is hard. It's hot and many of these poles and lines are in areas that have been inundated with water from the hurricanes.

Being downtown had power earlier most of the stores and restaurants started opening within a week. We still had to go into work, but after I would go to Walmart and walk around in the air conditioning or sit in a restaurant and cool off.

I remember the first night our power came back on, it was a Friday night, had a hot shower, clean bed sheets and A/C finally. It was heaven.

Some of our neighbors have whole-home propane generators, and I wouldn't mind having that, but my understanding is they do go "bad" after a decade or so. At least the residential type. Commercial ones I hear are better built.

What I ultimately want to do, once I get my own place and it's just me. Is to get a small window A/C unit and one of those small, quiet generators, so I can have A/C in just whichever room I sleep in. I don't care about the power being out really, other than it's just impossible to cool off and go to sleep in that heat. I could also run the fridge here and there.

 

[circlew]

Matt, do you not have all your computer equipment on battery backup with surge protection? When I had a desktop PC, I used a 500 watt APC unit, and had no trouble with power issues. What got my PC was a lightning strike to the pole across the street, which came in on the unprotected phone line. It didn't bother the Western Electric 2500 phones in the least, but fried the computer.

As for the longevity of generators, the commercial units almost always have 1800 rpm engines, regardless of whether they run on natural gas, propane or diesel. Many of the residential models have 3600 rpm engines, especially under 20 KW rating. The faster running engines tend not to last as long. The liquid cooled models also do better than the air cooled, and all higher KW units are of the liquid cooled type. Gensets are like any other type of machinery, such as a car, truck or tractor, and have to be maintained on a regular basis to be reliable. All permanently installed units should be set up to automatically exercise themselves on a regular basis (every week to two weeks), and should be run under load every three months or so if there haven't been any power outages for a while. This needs to be done to make sure the transfer switch(s) are operating correctly, as they are known to stick if not operated for too long.

 

[mattl]

Tom, have my main computer on a surge with a dead battery b/u.  It's a large unit but the battery died a few years back.  Never had an issue with outages so it was an expense I let slip.  The HD does not spin up indicating the controller, so my hope is a new board will allow me to recover.  But in the meantime I've got to reinstall all sorts of stuff, the main reason I did not do the update to the new SSD.

 

[circlew]

Matt, I hope you can get things back in order without too much expense.

I never replaced my PC. Went to the library to use theirs for a couple years, and now have smart phone. May get a new computer next year if I can afford it.

 

[mark_wpduet]

OP

that's interesting and I never thought of that. Flipping main breaker off then others individually, then when power comes back on.....turn them all on at once to avoid power surge...

Our power rarely goes out but it has happened a few times. Everything is underground here in my subdivision. Back in 2003 I think or 2002, we had a horrible ice storm and power was out for 7 days. I was living in a different part of town.....the folks over in this area (at that time) never lost power. Being without power is miserable. I've often wondered if something goes terribly wrong with the power grid, we're so screwed.

After being without power for 7 days, I've never cared how much my power bill is because I feel like it's worth every penny.

 

[sudsmaster]

My experience is that the smaller gas powered lawn tools tend to be more susceptible to gas induced malfunction than the larger ones. Perhaps this is because the smaller ones are 2-strokes, which by their nature are dirtier. Also, the smaller ones tend to have odd carburetors that depend on rubber diaphragms that can swell and distort with old gas. They may also have smaller jets that are more easily clogged. I do use Sta-Bil in all my garden tools. I have a couple of then that need new carbs. I have the carbs, I'm just being lazy getting around to installing them. The 30" hedge trimmer will get its new carb first because the 10" high ivy-covered fence is just about at the limit of acceptable growth. As is the 6' high ivy-covered fence.

Fortunately things here have cooled down quite a bit so working in the yard isn't as grueling as when it's in the high 90's.

 

[sudsmaster]

Dan,

Whew. Don't mean to be petty and judgemental, but that video could be a very strong argument in favor of orthodontics. Probably too late now.

 

[qsd-dan]

strong argument in favor of orthodontics

It's a fake mouthpiece used as part of his spiel. There was an old vid of him that caught a short glimpse without the fakers. They looked fine.

 

[sudsmaster]

Fake teeth

I wondered if they were fake; LOL. Good to hear that they are fake. I was actually feeling rather sorry for him. I don't quite get why he wears them, but to each his own, I suppose.

 

[sudsmaster]

At around the 5:00 mark, this video shows Taryl without the "teeth". Still sounds about the same.

Love the shirt. No need to tuck it in!



(The preview frame also shows him w/o those buck teeth)

 

[sudsmaster]

Here's the preview pane w/o teeth as a gif...

 

[Chetlaham]

@dalangdon: I agree. The whole "power surge" thing tends to be overblown but you do make a good case scenario. A 115kv transmission line falling into a 12kv distribution line does some of the worst damage en mass.

@Mark_wp_duet: If you truly care about something just unplug it. I don't care what type of surge protection you have or how much of an internal contact gap those circuit breaker provide. A direct lighting strike or a 20,000 volt primary falling into your 120/240 volt secondary will arc across literally (and I mean literally) anything and trash everything. (I've seen whole homes needing to be rewired where the surge protection charred like everything else did) An open neutral can also turn surge suppressors into a fireball. If a storm is coming, just unplug. Once you power is on and nothing amiss (ie lights aren't dimming and brightening from an open neutral) then you plug back in.

As for power coming back on after an uneventful outage I wouldn't worry about flipping breakers, rarely is that accompanied by transients or over voltage voltage nor will the breaker panel have any control over it.