We were supposed to get more of the white stuff, but it’s turned into a full on ice storm! Power is out and we’re running on generator. The blog will remain up as long as I have gasoline and the fiber stays on. We already had one large branch come down. My UPS equipment is less than thrilled with the output of the generator, but they are taking it most of the time. You might have noticed a brief period of downtime earlier, as the outage happened when we were asleep and the UPS drained down before we could fire the generator.
UPDATE: Power came back just as I went out to get more of the precious juice for the generator. Everything is back to normal now, except for the fact that I have several large tree branches down in the yard.
I hate ice storms! Growing up in the Piedmont of NC we’d get those more often than a real snow. When the sun shines it looks real pretty. However, it is hard to appreciate the beauty when you are freezing.
Good luck to you! We are in the middle of an ice-storm although I am on the fringe and not getting much. You need an inverter (clean sine-wave) type genset to make your UPS happy. Those are expensive. I have a small one.
It’s happy enough most of the time, it gets grumpy when a motor kicks on and the voltage drops a bit until the generator can adjust.
Good luck, and stay warm. I just finished blowing and shoveling about four inches of slop with a lovely ice coating. My arms are falling off.
Good Luck and stay safe.
And I just read on Eric S Raymond’s blog about evac from his house. He’s somewhere around Philly.
I have a Generac on the NG line. It’s convenient but I do have some problems with it maintaining a good 60Hz signal. I suspect a local control problem as opposed to a general product/manufacturer issue.
And since I’ve gotten it, there hasn’t been significant outages, it’s like a talisman.
I think ESR lives in Chester County, near where I work. They got slammed. We didn’t get it quite so bad.
I was the same way with my generator. I had wanted one since Irene came through, and we were a 20 minute outage away from being flooded out in the basement without the pump. Fortunately, we never lost power during Irene, or Sandy for that matter. I finally bought the generator after Irene but before Sandy on what I thought would be a protracted outage, but power came back about an hour after I got the generator set up and running. That’s all the duty it did until today, where it ran five hours.
It earned its keep today. We would have been screwed without the generator, because I don’t have heat without electricity to power the furnace controller and the circulator pump. It also powered the sump pump just fine, and allowed me to recharge the sump pumps backup battery, which had been depleted. They claim that backup battery can run for six hours, but I’m skeptical. It was drained pretty badly after only a few hours.