CraigD Posted January 30, 2011 Report Posted January 30, 2011 I and mine have endured yet another of my region's periodic weather-caused electric power breakdowns. In the last rays of sunset Wednesday, I looked out my home window to see the last of about 8 inches of wet, flaky snow, fall for the windless, barely freezing day. A couple of hours later, I settled down repeat a bit of data conversion I've been doing with a big team of other system support folk, end user validators and various project managing types. One of the latter emailed me a short "am sitting in the dark with a flashlight and my Blackberry", which I should have recognized as prophetic, as minutes before the start of my button-pushing part in things, my power flip-flopped a couple of times, then stayed down. No major trouble, think I in a state of techy hubris, as I've a laptop and a small UPS on my various internetty gadgets, enough to keep everything good for a few hours, so after another 10 min or so of teleconferring, I push the main conversion button and prepare for an uneventful hour or two of monitoring and tele-telling everyone everything's well. A few minutes into this, my first check shows, puzzlingly, nothing happening, and after a couple of minutes checking that the check isn't the problem, I head for the server where the conversion process should be processing, when, suddenly ... ... my network connection goes <critical stop sound> (AKA the chord of doom) - well, actually one rude IDE does, but the effect's poignant and to-the-point. All my gadgets are glowing happily and poweredly, but somewhere in the blacked out out there, something in the Verizon FIOS world won't let me log on (my first thought was that the UPS for the FIOS box had died, but a check of the phone jack with a corded phone revealed dialtone - that wouldn't fail 'til next AM), and all my blacked-out neighbors' non-UPSed WiFi spots are gone. The management types vetoed my traveling the snowy (or at least snow-covered) night to a place with power or my datacenter, whichever came first, so I was now a phone-only bystander. Among the folk on the call was one person with the right system access to see an obvious logged error with my process's ID on it, so with a bit of further ado and further checking to assure nothing bad has come of this failure-to-start, the night's festivities are declared done. My high-efficiency gas furnace needs AC power for its flue blower, so even if I got a little power to its thermostat input, it's a no-go, and with night, it's getting cold outside and in. It's late enough to just got to bed with lots of blanket and wait for day - and hopefully, power - so we do. Morning, cold outside and dark inside and getting colder inside, I drive to my un-power outaged office, find and fix the cause of the woe, get the tele-party restarted, finish around 3 PM what should have been done last night, and head back home to work on converting my 1950s era house into a 19th century wood-burner. Fortunately, the house has a little, mostly ornamental fireplace in its main living space. Fortunately, I have a big pile of scrap lumber from an old masonry project in a nice dry garage. Unfortunately, the only non-AC powered saw I have is a cheap handsaw, badly in need of beveling and sharpening. More unfortunately, the little fireplace can make about a 5 foot semicircle of warmth. Fortunately for me, I go to the office everyday. My wife does not, and is not pleased. About 4:00 PM Sat, uncounted board-feet of scrap lumber and a couple of bundled of over-priced shrink-wrapped firewood later, with nary a flicker, power is restored to chez CraigD. Previous power outages, my wife has cursed the darkness and called for us to get a generator. We're now agreed, viscerally convinced that my local electric distribution system will continue to deteriorate for at least a few years - it seems no sort of political process can compel our supplier, Pepco, to take more than minimal steps to strengthen the system to prevent outages such as this one. Spending a few $K for a good backup gen set now seems wise. Quote
Qfwfq Posted January 31, 2011 Report Posted January 31, 2011 Spending a few $K for a good backup gen set now seems wise.Perhaps photovoltaic with an accumulator for the night? Quote
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.