Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Everything Else => Topic started by: JMB on October 31, 2011, 04:00:32 pm
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Stupid October snowstorm! :angry:
Power has already been out for two days and we are looking at possibly not having it fully restored until at least Nov 3rd. There are so many towns without any power gas stations in towns with power have lines that look like the 70's gas shortage.
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Good luck to you. I wonder if ChadTower is w/o since he's in Mass. I knew a few others haven't posted lately and they're from the NE.
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My uncle in Pennsylvania posted on Facebook that he doesn't have power and it's not supposed to be on again until Wednesday. Makes me glad I live in Texas sometimes. Aside from the lack of rain and crazy heat that is.
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Good luck to you. I wonder if ChadTower is w/o since he's in Mass. I knew a few others haven't posted lately and they're from the NE.
so what you're saying is, the storm wasnt all bad?
I kid I kid. I was just south enough to not get hit bad and or lose power, pretty much anyone north of philly got it worse
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I wonder if ChadTower is w/o since he's in Mass.
Chad is about an hour and half southeast of where I am. I know they weren't hit as hard as we were in the western half of the state but I have no idea what their power situation is. I know people just a bit further down 495 have had no issues.
Temp in the house was a balmy 47 degrees this morning! Nothing like being excited to get to work just to have power and heat.
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got my power back last night (Monday night) @ 10:30Pm (been out since Friday 2Pm).
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got my power back last night (Monday night) @ 10:30Pm (been out since Friday 2Pm).
I'd love to get mine back tonight, but I don't think it will be. We lost ours Saturday afternoon. First day is fine. Second day is tolerable, after that it just sucks.
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Good luck to you. I wonder if ChadTower is w/o since he's in Mass. I knew a few others haven't posted lately and they're from the NE.
I didn't lose power but most of my town and the surrounding towns did. There were random pockets of people with power and last report I saw this morning said 9% of my town was still without. I was lucky this time. I had power and nobody else on my street did. Probably because I live on the corner. Last time I didn't have power for a week but two houses down never lost it. I did lose phone and internet for a couple days.
This storm didn't drop too much snow but it did just as much damage here as the hurricane did. Maybe it did more. It dropped 4-5" of severely heavy snow within a few hours on trees that still had their leaves. There were 50mph winds. Trees came down all over the place and took random utility lines down everywhere.
I'm going today to a local wood stove dealer to see if it is viable to have one put in my basement. Our furnace has an electric blower. If we lose power for a week in the winter we're in trouble.
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For once, it stayed on! :dizzy:
I bought a generator a couple years ago after losing power for about 4 days in the Summer. It was awful. Its easier to get warm than stay cool, but I still feel for anyone going through that.
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All I really care about is the heat during winter. We can make do with or without every other condition. We have coolers, we can cook outdoors, we can put food out in the shed if it's winter, etc. The one thing we really cannot do is heat our house without the electric blower controls. I need to fix that and I'm leaning heavily towards a nonmechanical wood stove for emergency/supplemental heating. My house really isn't designed with that in mind, though, so I'm researching what the requirements are. I know you need about 3' clearance all around the stove but am not 100% clear on the venting requirements. Plus it has to meet code or my insurance company will have a cow.
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A wood burner has saved our tails a few times now. One of them things we thought about removing, but glad we didn't. Our is pretty good sized, big enough to easily cook an entire meal on. And when stoked up nice and hot it will almost run ya out of the house and will last through the night and still have hot coals in the morning. We live out in the country, the grid isn't all that great, so even deer farts have been known to knock out the power.
We generally worry about ice, not snow though.
Our worst ice storm since I've been here we lost power for 12 days. I was a lumberjacking fool during that spell.
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Ice storms historically have caused more outages than we have had even with massive snow. Over the last year, though, we have had multiple sustained outages. None of them have been during bad winter weather but that is obviously going to happen.
I went to a stove/hearth dealer last night. It looks like in my house I have to have a doublewalled stainless vent pipe run from the basement to the roof. Can't use the chimney because there are already two things using it and it isn't lined. Initial swag on install cost is $1500 but that was without an actual site visit. I can get a good stove rated to 2200sqft with a cooktop for $500. My house is only 1100sqft plus the basement. Considering I'm thinking supplemental for the oil furnace and only primary when power is out that is way more than enough.
I figure if I can supplement with the tons of free firewood we get around here via fallen trees and save 25% of our oil consumption that is $700 right now (in today's oil price). That's three years to pay for itself. I think 25% is way conservative, too, considering that where I grew up we heated with only a similar stove in a larger and far older house.
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Our stove is a Wonderwood 2941. Rated @ 1700 sqft. Our house is right close to that 1700, single level, not super well built, but I can assure you this thing will run you slam out of the main room it's in when it gets going. Ours sits in front of and is vented through the original fireplace which is useless for heat.
The number one thing I love about it is that you can fit real "logs" in it. No chinsy sized burning compartment. I rarely split wood around hear. Cut em' a little under 2 ft long and chuck them in there. I'd say maybe 8"-10" dia logs or so. Use smaller branches and whatnot for kindling to get it started and then set a log on it an go. Like you, we have enough fallen trees and such to keep us going for a long time.
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Good pic of what it looked like around here on Sunday. Tonight will be night six without power if it hasn't come up while I was at work.
(http://linapps.s3.amazonaws.com/linapps/photomojo/wwlp.com/photos/2011/10/g1323-october-snowstorm-aftermath-2011/29115-43249.jpg)
edit for typo
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Yeah, that's about what it looked like here too.
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Finally got our Power back yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon. The morning after the storm I was outside trying to clean up branches and such, and it sounded like someone was shooting fireworks into the trees with the loud "Cracking" of limbs. Few big trees came down, lots of branches, I ran around shaking the ornamental trees so they would dump the snow/ice and not snap, only lost 1 of those that split into 4 parts.
Not fun, finally got generator, need to wire cutovers for the furnace and well since without Power we don't get heat or water at present.
Bleh.
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Good pic of what it looked like around here on Sunday. Tonight will be night six without power if it hasn't come up while I was at work.
(http://linapps.s3.amazonaws.com/linapps/photomojo/wwlp.com/photos/2011/10/g1323-october-snowstorm-aftermath-2011/29115-43249.jpg)
edit for typo
That's crazy man! Serious damage to everything in it's path...
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You guys are getting it good up there ain't ya. :P
That sound of cracking and breaking frozen trees gets almighty scary when the sun goes down.
Hope things get better for ya'll soon.
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Finally got power back at 9:30 last night. Time to move the beer from the snow packed cooler back to the fridge.
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Saturday 9pm for me, so just over a week. I'm in central CT. Several of my friends were out until Monday night, and even tonight I passed at least 20 utility trucks.
Now, where did I put the chainsaw...
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Stove installer is coming on the 17th for an estimate. Looks like we're going to have to run a double walled stainless pipe from the basement to the roof. Maybe if there is some miracle he can run it out from the basement and up the side but something tells me that won't be an option.