Power Outage!
By Karina | March 1, 2010
We had our share of that nasty weather that’s been going around this winter this weekend – where I live I got about 30 inches of snow from Thursday through Saturday. Which, you know, NO BIG DEAL. Sure our driveway is about 170 ft long, and kind of steep at the bottom, but we’re young and tough and good at shoveling. I was able to work from home on Thursday and Friday (when they declared a State of Emergency for our county) to avoid dangerous road conditions, and it just seemed like a big adventure at the start.
The BIG DEAL, however, was that the power went out! Thursday night! and it stayed off for 48 hours! I was mentally prepared to be one of those people you read about – the ones without power 5 or 7 days after the storm. When the lights first blew it was just a few houses around us impacted. Overnight, however, all those other houses lost power too, until according to our unscientific guessing it seemed that nearly our entire Village was dark – and also most of the surrounding towns around us too. According to an early estimate, over 90% of our local power company’s customers in our County were without power on Friday!
Being without power really raised some appreciation for our modern luxuries. As much as Jenn and I talk sometimes about moving Team TinyChoices to an idyllic homestead somewhere, it is really nice to have heat on demand. We don’t have operational fireplaces, so we had to rely on our old house to retain heat as best as it could… and with no attic insulation and proven drafty walls, it wasn’t long until we were resting at about 50 degrees. Without heat input, though we were steady at 50 degrees until the second night, which knocked us down to 45 degrees! THAT was cold. I was pleasantly happy with the house, though – it was great that it retained so much heat for so long. This was important because we didn’t want our pipes to freeze. I recalled all those books where our pioneer ancestors had to break the ice on the washbasin every morning and had the sudden realization that this was an acceptable way to live because there wasn’t any centralized plumbing to freeze up! Because we live in an old house (1890 with a 1920 addition) we only have water on the “new” side of the house, so if we did have to abandon our frozen ship and head for a friends house, it would have been easy to drain the water lines so they wouldn’t freeze and burst.
As silly as I feel sometimes to rely on three different energy sources at our house (electricity, propane for hot water and cooking, and fuel oil to power the furnace) I am thankful to be so diversified. No matter how cold we were getting, we could always heat water for tea (we started making two pots at a time and pouring one pot into a thermos for later) or wash dishes to warm ourselves up. Plus, on the infrastructure side of things, because we have town water it is pressurized enough to get into our house and out of our faucets without any (electrically powered) pumps – those people in the area with wells were not as lucky to have available water.
Our fridge stayed reasonably cold with a saucepan of snow on the upper shelf, but I was nervous about the freezer. I have about 50 cups of corn in there still from our CSA share, and it would be tragic to lose them! The power company was giving out dry ice, and if the power had remained out I would have had to get some to cool everything off.
We got through the cold weather by wearing the right clothes – wool layers for me! lots of layers – including hats to bed. Whenever we got cold we would walk around the house or go outside to shovel. And we drank lots and lots of tea. It was really comfy at night in bed, our flannel sheets and down comforter really did the trick! but we REALLY missed our hot rice bag – without the microwave we didn’t have a good way to warm it up. This is where a hot water bottle could have come in handy. We borrowed an alcohol burner stove to take the edge off when it was super cold, and we used candles and flashlights to find our way around the house. We didn’t try to read after dark, and we were graciously hosted for dinner on one of the two nights the power was out (and we brought our cell phones and charged them up while we ate).
All in all, if we did end up without power for another 5 days, I think we could do it, but it would get old QUICK. So I’m happy that we’ve got our power back on now. Of course this is yet another reason to hurry up and insulate the attic – and I already have my eyes on the thin film solar panel market. Also we’re looking into a buying a small chest freezer so we can do a better job of freezing CSA veg and sourcing locally raised meat in bulk quantities, and if we have a multi-day power outage with a freezer, it will be really stressful for me. We have friends nearby with a generator who will share, but it seems like so much work.
And I guess our green decision last year not to buy a snow-blower was really tested this year! Thursday we shoveled the driveway about three times, and we woke up to a fresh eight inches (at least!) on Friday to deal with. It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that we’d shoveled the entire driveway – and by my rough calculations, that’s about 264 cubic yards of snow moved by hand. No wonder my biceps are huge and my shoulders ache!
Also: huge thanks to Jenn, who handled Friday and Saturday posts and was prepared to swap our regularly scheduled posting days with me so Monday content would remain uninterupted!
How have you handled extreme weather conditions lately?
[[Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/djt23/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]]
Topics: Home | 2 Comments »
Well…you could have at least put your valuables (the CSA corn, of course) in a critter proof container outside!
I, too went through some major elec outtages during our “twin hurricanes” of 2004. Frances and Jeanne.
First time I was without power for 4 days, second time 11 days.
Now, practically everyone in my area has generators just in case…but, not me. I am a stubborn hold out. Unless you buy the SUPER expensive ones, they are SO LOUD (and you know, what: NO ONE has needed them since).
I actually enjoyed not having elec…I know, weird. I don’t mind being hot…now trying to live in a house that was only 40 degrees and ALL of that snow would just be too much for me. But here in Sunny FL it was doable.
There was something about the simplicity of it all…And, people were so darn neighborly…we shared distrubuted ice…had impromptu cookouts in the streets…but, I DID have running water (city, no well) and that made all of the difference.
For three years, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. For two of those years I lived w/o elec and running water. So, I know I can do it. And of course, MANY people in this world live without elec and running water.
Though I definitely appreciate my luxuries, whenever I feel as if living conditions are getting inconvenient, I just remind myself of my days of mannually pulling water from a well and finding the strategic shade and breezes…and how most of my friends over there still live that way and always will.
I sympathize. I went through a week long power outage Christmas week the year I bought my home. Fortunately we have a gas fireplace, we used for heat and used our camping gear. We slept in the living room on our sofa bed in heavy sleeping bags with quilts.
Even with tent camping gear and a childhood of experience, we couldn’t get around that our kitchen is all electric. So is the little fan that blows the hot air from our furnace through the ducts from our natural gas furnace. Ah, the little things we learn to appreciate! We saved some of our food from spoiling in the refrigerator by putting it in coolers in our garage.
It was romantic unwrapping Christmas gifts by candle and firelight though :)