Hi.
We just had something like this happen to us just a few weeks ago.
anybody hear on the news about a storm that knocked out the Virginia and
West Virginia and Ohio areas? they said on the news that 80 percent of
West Virginia citizens were without power. Our power was off for 6 days.
It was just about 100 degrees every one of those days. We happened to
have a Tecumseh 5500 Wat gasoline generator, but it wasn't running very
well of course. On top of that, we just built this house, totally
ironic. in the last house we were using 4 or 5 window air conditioners
to keep cool during the summer. In this new house we have a 3 ton 36000
CBTU central air conditioner. that generator was able to run 3 of those
window air conditioners. We sold those air conditioners when we were
building the new house to have the money to put towards the building
project. That generator couldn't run the central air unit. We had no
window air conditioning for 5 of those days. We finally got us a 5000
CBTU window air conditioner for 99 dollars from Kai mart, no really K
mart but lol anyway. That did a passable job of keeping us cool until
the power came back on, was just a few hours after we got it. Ouch! I
have a Honda EU10, which is a small and very quiet inverter generator
that runs for 9 hours on 0.6 gallons of gasoline. Inverter power is
really clean with no spikes or brownouts, which makes it great to run
electronic equipment like desktop computers and printers and what not.
Most laptops can take pretty lousy electricity because the transformer,
that's the brick that charges it, will help to clean up the field as it
converts to dc.
Like you were saying, if that had happened to us in the winter, we would
have had NG still and could have easily powered the furnace fan to heat
our house most likely even with my small generator. It's so ironic.
everyone is mostly concerned about heating during an emergency
situation. Now days with these occasional extreme heat summers and with
people used to good air conditioning all their lives having cooling
environments is also important. Heat is easier to do than cool air. What
about refrigerators and the like. that's bad too. We were lucky to have
our generator. We live on a farm and are proudly somewhat self
sufficient. Not at all completely, but more so than people in Chicago or
New York or a lot of other larger cities would be. I maintained an
internet connection through the power outage and was not only able to
continue reading books and playing games and checking email, but could
keep on downloading new books to read. There's an interesting feeling
when you get to do those things in spite of the situation you're in. As
far as food, we have lots of food in the seller and in the freezers. As
long as we could find gasoline, which we did have trouble doing, and
keep that old generator going, we could sustain a passable living for a
month or so at least I'm thinking. We even had trouble catching up with
Diesel for our truck, which is weird because not many people use diesel
generators. We drove the diesel truck to town to get gasoline in case we
were unable to find gasoline and would have to resort to using the
gasoline in the trail blazer to run the generator. Only thing i can
think of is big stores like walmart and the like must have been using up
the diesel supply to keep their big diesel generators going. If worse
had come to worse, we could have moved back into my camper which we had
just moved out of into the new house and used that since that old
generator was plenty powerful enough to run the air conditioner in the
camper. We knew of people who did that. Once we were driving and saw
people in a camper next to a house that had no roof. When our power came
back on, we let someone we don't know very well at all borrow the
generator. they needed it for three more days before their power came
back on and their house is only a mile and a half from ours.
We were able to run the electric stove in the kitchen with the
generator, or failing that we could use the outdoor grill at least until
we ran out of LP. I agree, when the power goes out, your first worry is
definitely not how you'll be writing or playing games. It's all about
how to keep the refrigerator and freezer going, how to heat up the
food. How to get freshwater. city folks do have the country folks
outdone on that in some ways because the water pump in that city will
most likely be driven by a backup generator or battery, meaning the
people in their homes need only be concerned with heating the water. For
the people out in the country who use water wells a generator is needed
to keep the water supply handy. Our generator had quite a time keeping
up with the water pump and the hot water tank even with everything else
turned off. Plus, we have cows on the farm, and their is another well
that we had to keep running as much as possible too given how hot it was
and how dry in spite of that terrific storm. We have a spring that never
seems to die out, but they weren't all turned in there at the time so we
needed to keep the tank filled up as much as possible on top of our own
supply. we learned a lesson there and used money we didn't really have
sitting around for that to buy a much larger generator in case this
happens again. that was definitely interesting, but the constant worry
about overloading the generator and causing it to brownout and damage
all our expensive electronics like a 2000 dollar refrigerator really
took us down a few pegs. Seriously, I agree with the one who said the
bit about how will we write when the power goes out. How does anyone
these days write when the power goes out. when the power goes out why do
you even need to write. what are you going to write, a letter to the
electric company complaining about the lack of power? Plus, how's
braille going to help anyway. How many electric companies can read
braille, anyone know? Lol. I'll be out trying to work a garden with my
mom and dad or doing something just about as far from sitting down to
write as I can get if the power goes out and stays out long enough to
matter. Grin
hsurprisingly the survey showed that a huge majority of the U.S.
population were woefully unprepared for any kind of crisis longer than a
couple of days let alone months. As I recall the survey asked about very
basic items like a box of matches to start a cooking fire or to light a
candle, candles for light, a months supply of canned foods, jugs of
water, etc. Turns out that the average person living in major cities
like New York City and Chicago didn't have a box of matches or a candle.
Can food supplies were what one would expect. That is maybe enough for
one or two weeks tops. Just enough to hold the family over until the
next run to the store. Not exactly hope for an extended crisis. Bottom
line, I think should something that bad ever hit the United States,
United Kingdom, or any other industrialized society the lack of being
able to read books etc via the computer would be the least of a blind
person's worries. Basic survival would be paramount over being able to
read books in braille, via e-book, or whatever. I should know as I've
been there before. What I mean by that is about 8 years ago we had a
snow storm that knocked out the power county wide. It was out for about
eight days in the middle of winter. Fortunately, at the time I was
living next door to my dad, and while we didn't have power the gas was
still working. That allowed us to have heat from the gas heaters, heat
up a bowl of soup on the gas stove, and kept us alive. Not only that my
step mom likes to collect scented candles and we were burning them all
week long for light and to read by in the evenings etc. Obviously, we
survived the ordeal, but we were lucky. We happened to be better
prepared for that crisis. I can remember listening to news reports on
the radio where firemen and county rescue workers were picking up
families and taking them to relief shelters to keep them alive simply
because they weren't prepared to survive that kind of crisis. They
relied too much on modern conveniences, and when it was gone they had
absolutely nothing to fall back on. Cheers!
---
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