Man, we keep having these once-a-century events on the heels of one another! I am wondering, now, if in the past the once-a-century events did indeed all happen in the same decade in the days of yore. Maybe the wild weather we are having all on the heels of itself is actually the normal swings of weather independent of climate. Of course, that makes me a Global Warming Denialist, clearly our current batch of adverse weather can ONLY be explained by the end of times apocalypse brought on by our profligate use of fossil fuels, the remedy for which is inescapably the destruction of our civilization before it self destructs (wtf?).
Anyway, as I have no doubt bored you with before, we have a house in the Virginia country side and that is where we spend our weekends and much of our free time (though it ain’t so free since we are doing construction). We were planning a party on Saturday and I was laboring in the insane heat doing landscaping to try to make the place look nice all day Friday. Then, while relaxing (but before taking a shower, something I had cause to regret for the next two days) we watched the storm front move in. Our place gets a lot of very strong winds during the winter and we had things blow down that have made it through years of severe winter storms, so I imagine the winds were right up there with hurricane speeds. Despite a neighbors reassurance that in the 15+ years he had lived there he had had only like 12 hours total loss of power, we got zapped. Going out on Saturday for breakfast we found trees on power lines on either side of us, though we were finally able to find a route out. We didn’t decide to look for a generator until late Sat afternoon and of course they were all long gone by then. Sunday we went on another quixotic quest to find a generator and stopped by our old stalwart Home Depot. They said that while they didn’t have any, they were expecting a truck with nearly 200 that should be there in a few hours. While we sat arguing if we should wait or come back, they returned and said that the truck was actually there already and they were unloading. Thus we got a 5500 watt generator (only about $600 if I recall) which turned out to be just enough to run our two portable AC units, the fridge, the TV and the internet (yes, we had DSL, go figure). Sadly, it isn’t enough to run the well pump, since I wanted a heavy duty pump instead of the typical residential sized one, so we will have to continue with buying water and using it to flush.
Our house in Maryland isn’t any better, the power is off there as well. Fortunately, being on city water we could still take (cool, but not cold, since the water bakes all day in the sun (were we to get the pump going in Shen we would have to take freezing showers as that water comes out of the ground at 55 degrees)) showers. Man, that felt great after being so sweaty and gross for three solid days. The house has a full basement which is much cooler than the rest of the house and that is where we slept (just me and the wife, we left the rest of our party with my wife’s sister-in-law where they had power). The trip in was a bit surreal. Several places on Connecticut Avenue were closed entirely on one side because of trees and power lines. It is going to be the full week like they say before they can get all this crap cleaned up, that is for sure.
My work location has power now, though it didn’t on Saturday. I was planning on being here Mon and Tues and taking the rest of the week of, something I will keep with since at least it is cool here and I have ‘net connectivity. We are back to Shen Tues afternoon, though, but at least we have AC and TV, though that generator sure makes a damn racket. I think that this will serve as the final incentive to come up with an off-grid system for our place in the country. I have been doing some figuring over the last couple of years (indeed, since we bought the land, so since 2004) about ways to develop a reasonably economical off-grid system and have had some ideas that survived the initial sanity check. I will delve deeper into those ideas and see if I can find any that withstand the higher levels of scrutiny. It would have to be cobbled together from used equipment, but I think it might be do-able for the price of a moderate (24KW) standby generator and be robust enough to cover the whole house.
I will probably post a bit today and tomorrow, but don’t expect anything the rest of the week.
