When our power came back on last night, it was a bit of a surprise. We were only without juice for a little over a day. They’d been saying on the news it could be a week or more, so we were preparing for the long haul. One by one the neighborhoods around here are coming back online, and we were lucky to be on the early side. A lot of our friends are still without power, so Jeannie invited them all over today to warm up, recharge their electronics, and hop on our internet for a while. It’s exactly what we were wishing for last night so, you know, spread some good karma. The kids were still off school today, and mostly it was parents of their friends. It made for a pleasant day. They had a little Halloween party. Jeannie made some pies. I mostly stayed down in my office and tried to get work done. My boss said we’re all telecommuting until the mass transit situation improves.
I was able to patch up our roof today too, by enlisting a roofer who’d come by to work on our neighbor’s house. That turned out to be a lucky break. He replaced some shingles and patched a leak, and the roof is good enough now to last until we get around to redoing the whole thing. Jeannie and I spent some quality time crawling around in the attic, seeing what exactly got wet, which was very little.
These extreme weather events are getting more frequent, so it’s best to think thru the backup power question for the long term. Our two main liabilities are heat and communications. Third I suppose is the fridge, but even without power it’s like a giant cooler. As long as we can get ice we’ll be okay. We had hot water, since that’s gas powered and has a pilot. Our heat is gas powered, too, but has an electric pilot and regulator. If we loose power in the winter it’d be a major problem. For now we were able to just put on sweaters and wool socks. I wonder what it would take to have that run on battery backup or from external power. I’m sure the power draw is minimal, and it’s mainly a matter of hooking up the right components. We’re going to get our hot water heater replaced sometime soon, so when that happens I’ll see about if there’s some kind of retrofit available. Otherwise we’re looking at some kind of homegrown hack, but I can’t imagine it’d be that hard.
Another possibility is to put in a fireplace or wood stove. Then we’d have no worries and be all cozy on winter nights to boot. If only we could get Hockey Night in Canada down here, eh? This is something we’ve talked about since we got our house, but have never gotten around to. Maybe it’s time to dust off that idea and push ahead. My current thinking is to install a woodstove down in our family room in the corner near the furnace room. Or maybe a full-on fireplace. I guess this is a pretty big project with lots of issues to work out, but not bigger than say building a patio, which is something I’ve done in the past.
The other liability is telecommunications. In the old days, when our phone was connected to the world with copper wires, it would never go out. When we got fiber optic a few years ago, they pulled out the copper before the truck even left our driveway. Now we have phone and internet on one glass thread, but it requires power. There’s a battery backup that lasts only about eight hours. Suk.
We hooked up the Prius last night to house via a power inverter. We’d considered buying a generator in case of a power outage, but the Prius makes an admirable generator, plus has a huge battery of built-in batteries to boot. The engine wasn’t even running most of the time. Unfortunately our old power inverter went Kaput some time ago and we only discovered it yesterday, so we had to go out and get a new one. As you might imagine, selection is limited in times of crisis, so the one we got was fairly wimpy, just ten amps. This was enough to power our phone and recharge its battery until the morrow morn. We were also able to recharge our laptops and cel phones one by one, and to get on the internet. We plugged my laptop directly into the Ethernet and bypassed the router and wifi. This created problems down the line when the power came back on and Verizon wouldn’t release our IP address to get the router back on again. Ah progress.
Of course, a heftier power inverter would be a decent upgrade. It’d be nice to be able to power the fridge, at least part time. Still, it was looking like we’d be able to get by pretty much indefinitely under that system, which is good news. We had candles for light, and could cook on the stove but not the oven (again that pesky electric regulator/ignition), and we had hot water. As long as we could go out and gas up the Prius from time to time we could run it as needed to power the essentials.
Tomorrow the kids are back to school, but I’m working at home again since they have only a half day. Jeannie’s going into the city to work, since they’ve announced limiter service on Metro North. Wish us luck!