One of my tasks as battery test tech at [not Segway] was sparking freshly charged lead acid batteries to see if the engineer's venting schemes worked (NOT!). A hydrogen meter found it everywhere including the lowest point in the building.
The gave me a circuit board antistatic bin to contain the blast. The engineer thought it was a dishpan.
-jsw
LOWEST point? That was either a heluva lot of hydrogen, or one crappy ventilation system.
Sure! What's the worst that could happen?
Lowest point, with hydrogen's buoyancy? Interesting. Was it a small amount which had been fluffed around by fast-moving air, or what?
I hope they also gave you a rubber apron, shoulder length nitrile gloves, face mask, and goggles.
No, solar ain't cheap, but it buys self-sufficiency, and a normal-as- possible life during power outages. Good PV batteries can last a decade. Trojan and Rolls-Surette seem to be two very good brands with long histories and experience. I'm looking at Trojan 6-volters: T105-RE ($532/4 Amazon) and L16RE-B ($1352 for 4 @ Amazon via a vendor who has outlets in each state/free "local" pickup. I think mine is Medford, 30 miles down I-5.) A Vegas vendor wanted $1572 + $1600 to ship last year, so run away from Batteries In A Flash. Anyway, they're 225 and 370Ah each, respectively.
_A_ battery? Banks are needed for power, and to finance the batteries. :-/
Just curious: do you continue to get TV and internet when the regional power is down for days/weeks?
What do you mean by "general-purpose heating appliance"? Are you using/going to be using it for heating air, water, and food, or what?
Air alternative: Pick up a couple of the $10 12v car heaters from HF. About 150w each, and enough to warm up a tent in a hurry, combined with our 100-120w human bodies.
I use my rice cooker with the steamer top ($50 304-stainless-bowl model from Miracle,
I have determined that my cable system (Spectrum, formerly Time Warner) stays up for five hours after an outage. That's a disappointingly short time.
That was an example, similar to what Batteries Plus recently quoted to me.
So far the TV stations and the landline and cellular services have stayed up on their batteries and generators. The Northeast has to prepare for both tropical hurricanes (TS Sandy) in summer and arctic ice storms in winter. I have both 3G and 4G wireless internet.
Week-long storm outages tend to occur in relatively narrow strips, like between all snow and all rain, or wind and flood damage near the coast. They aren't regional like power generation blackouts which we haven't suffered yet, though our safety margin is shrinking due to political opposition to coal, nuclear, pipelines and Canadian hydro.
Food-heating. I didn't write 'cooking' because it doesn't get hot enough to fry.
Wood stove, remember?
Do you have any idea how much power it takes to run a CATV distribution system? Those pole mounted power transformers are a 60V,
30A modified square wave from a Constant Voltage Transformer.That is 1800 VA, continuous, and typically powers about a half mile of CATV system. How much do you want to be added to your bill, to extend that three hour design?
It takes that much power to deliver 0dBmV to each house?
-jsw
The neighbors tell me they lose Xfinity TV and phone during outages, but not cell service. I no longer ask utilities much about their infrastructure because it arouses suspicions.
Aren't Leftists wonderful? No to this, no to that, no to the other, then SAVE ME from everything--after they've hosed any systems which could have.
Maybe we need two governments. One large one to serve just the Leftists covered by massive taxes paid only by them, then a small one to serve the actual Americans, with few taxes paid only by us.
OK.
Evidently not. But if you wanted to camp out in your living room...
The government they long for would ship their useless butts to the gulag.
_Forbes_ says that Maine's power problem is the grid, not generation:
[Nov. 5, 2017]"Nearly half of the people living in Maine spent a significant part of last week in the dark after a storm caused widespread power outages.
"Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of the Spanish utility holding
Monday...
"...Solar companies did not cause the prolonged power outage in Maine. Neither did deregulation. CMP did. Yes, the same utility company with the slogan "Flip a switch and we're there."
incompetence and lack of planning turned what should have been a short power outage into a prolonged and painful experience. The mega-scale
administration would not have made an iota of difference.
"The CMP Maine Power Reliability Program (MPRP) certainly did not keep
What do you think? Are they right?
On Nov 9, 2017, Ed Huntress wrote (in article):
Not enough information to tell.
However, I read the Forbes article to imply that there had been decades of deferred maintenance on Maine?s power distribution system, and MPRP was the funding vehicle chosen to make the down payment of bringing the distribition system up to snuff.
In Puerto Rico, they had the same problem, but no MPRP equivalent, and the hurricanes blew the existing ramshackle system into the sea. Total replacement is underway. Probably take a year.
Fortunate for Maine that they are too far North for real hurricanes.
Joe Gwinn
I agree. I thought maybe Jim knows more about it, because he lives with it.
Yup. I'm less than 3 miles from tidewater and 6 miles from Raritan Bay in NJ. We lost power with Irene in 2011, but it was restored in less than two days. We never lost power with Sandy.
The more rural areas of New Hampshire are also the slowest to be restored, as they prioritize the repairs that will help the most people. Maine is settled one town deep along the coast and much of the interior is sparsely populated.
-jsw
William Pentland is a professional agitator.
Does that mean you disagree that distribution is the problem?
stays up for five hours after an outage. That's a disappointingly short ti me.
Go to your local phone company's central office. Take a look at their backu p power and then tell me how I get dial tone for $11/month and it's got eno ugh batteries to last until doomsday, and enough generator & fuel to last t ill the coming of the messiah.
The cable company can afford some generators, and if they want to raise eve ryone's bills a couple of bucks a month to cover their cost, I'd be OK with that. I doubt many other people would notice the increase, tiny as it is c ompared to the cable company's other increases.
Yes, it does sometimes raise suspicions. I know what I know about the phone system and its backup power because I spent two years contracting for AT&T in about 30 local offices in the NY metro area. Part of my job was verifyi ng power budgets and delivery to AT&T's colocation cages. The stuff they ha ve in those places is impressive, and it works.
My knowledge the cable company power situation is empirically gained. Five hours (give or take a very little) after the power fails, the cable (and da ta) fail.
More interesting (and I have to get some better contacts to find out more) is the electrical utility. During a major outage, I had a talk with a super visor. I was wondering why it seemed so damned hard to find the busted wire or blown fuse. You know where the lights are on, you know where the lights are out. Look at a friggin map and fix it. "Not so easy" he said. The noti on that there's any sort of "grid" in the local system is just a fantasy. A real diagram would be more like a picture of a bowl of spaghetti. I know, for instance that there are loops and parallels and distributed transformer s, etc.
But still, it seems to me that there could be (at the cost of a few bucks e ach) a transponder in, say, each transformer that would let them know it's got power. Much easier than driving around with a flashlight to look at the poles & wires.
The storm blew down trees that broke power lines and poles, so in that sense distribution was a problem. The bucket trucks have a safe wind limit of 35(??) MPH which the last storm exceeded all the next day, delaying restoration. The news said a crew could install two poles per day. One of their anchors took Pole Climbing 101 and demonstrated that he already has the right job.
A crew had just trimmed the trees near the lines here a week before but they don't touch trees on private property that are further back. I did ask.
Eversource serves NH, MA and CT but not Maine, so I know nothing of conditions there. Eversource brings in crews from all over the Northeast and some from Canada to repair damage quickly, and loans crews out for their problems. I think I've seen a truck from Ohio. Smaller independents are slower to restore power.
Eversource has crews on standby for another windstorm tonight.
-jsw
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