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Post by papaof2 on Jul 12, 2021 18:57:16 GMT -6
A bit more in the on-going thunderstorms this week-
I pushed hard yesterday afternoon to get the bit of grass we do cut finished before I was rained out. It sprinkled as I was gassing up the mower and the dark clouds looked threatening so I tried to finish quickly. The mower has a foot control for speed and direction - toe down for forward, heel down for reverse - and I was running toe-pedal-to-the-metal across the straight sections and making two-handed turns at the end of each pass. The riding mower is manual steering so steering effort increases with speed (the Deere 318 with hydraulic power steering wasn't in the budget, even a used model). Didn't sleep well because I was up multiple times hunting pain relief for my hands: acetaminophen - fail; naproxen sodium - fail; oxycodone - we have a winner.
It turned out I could have taken all the time I wanted yesterday as the serious rain didn't arrive until tonight after sundown - heavy enough to be heard through the double-pane windows and occasionally even louder when the wind was blowing the rain against the windows.
Georgia Power currently has 8500 meters out across the state with the biggest group of 3800 in the Macon area. Our power co-op has a grand total of 3 meters out. The other co-op has no meters out in any of the counties it serves. Just a few miles spacing from the thunderstorm makes a big diffenece...
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Post by papaof2 on Jul 26, 2021 0:59:43 GMT -6
The other power co-op in the county has an interesting outage. 21 meters that went out at 20:13 on 25 July with an initial ERT of 00:15 on 26 July. At 02:30 on 26 July, the ERT is 05:15 on 26 July. Sunday's 92F high was followed by an inch of rain, so welcome to a hot, muggy night in the sunny South and good luck sleeping without any air conditioning.
They had another outage of 23 meters which happened within 20-30 minutes of the 21 meter outage and with a similar intital ERT. Did they only have the parts to fix one of the outages?
If foods are getting thin, perhaps wire, circuit breakers, fuses and transformers are also hard to find?
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Post by 9idrr on Jul 26, 2021 15:03:47 GMT -6
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Post by papaof2 on Jul 27, 2021 17:54:20 GMT -6
Unless you have a lot of uncommitted $$$ (translation: you can overbuild by 100%), residential solar power is more viable as short term backup or "cabin in the woods" power for the long term. If you have the $$$, a large solar installation with LiFePO4 or LTO battery banks (and sufficient spare parts) could be a "20 year" power source.
For commercial solar (or wind) power to truly be useful for the long term, it needs some means of huge energy storage so that "power plant" could provide power after dark and on cloudy days (windless days for wind turbines). Batteries are probably the first thought, but a flywheel spinning in a vacuum or a "pump and store" hydro facility (build a lake to feed from and another one to catch the used water so no concerns about the supply lake going dry during a drought). None of those are highly efficient storage but with the cost of solar farms dropping, building a bigger farm to handle the losses in the storage system might be a reasonable solution.
If the grid went away today, we'd have perhaps 30 days of generator-assisted backup power for the big (28 cu ft) fridge and the freezer. In that timeframe, we'd empty the freezer (cooking and eating some things, moving others to the freezer section of the big fridge) and then work our way through what's in the big fridge so we'd only need the 4.4 cu ft counter height fridge - which our solar can power for the long term. No icemaker (does have two tiny ice cube trays), no chilled water dispenser - but in a grid down situation most people would not have running water so those wouldn't work anyway. Backup to the small fridge would be a home-built Peltier cooler with a home-built controller - not nearly as big or efficient as the compressor-driven 4.4 cu ft fridge (although I did see a very efficient Peltier fridge on Youtube and I might include some of those ideas).
If the grid is down, there will be no cable TV (possibly no local TV unless they have a generator and a long term supply of fuel - but a radio station with backup power is more likely), no internet (How many people still use dialup?) and eventually no landline or cell phone service (no fuel for backup generators at local central offices and cell towers) so no need to power the cable TV box or the internet router, etc.
Laundry would be with in a 5 gallon bucket or a #2 washtub, using a dasher from lehmans.com. Having the $100 clamp-on wringer for the washtub (available from Lehman's) would be a convenience and much easier on your hands than manual wringing (it's on the list). Wash water for clothing might include water used for washing hands to be able to use that soap and water more than once. An old wringer washer with "suds saver" tubs would be a good option if you have some power and it wouldn't need power for as long as a more modern washing machine: just let it agitate until things look "clean enough" and the "suds saver" - which could be made from a couple of laundry sinks and some hoses - would allow using the same wash water (and maybe rinse water) for more than one load - the water used to wash towels could then be used to wash dirty coveralls. Clothes drying would be solar powered - either in the sun if there is sun or on a line in the basement with a solar-charged battery powering a small fan and taking much longer. Without running water, the upstairs bath wouldn't be in use so string lines over that tub and hang some things there. No central air means having some windows open for ventilation in warm weather so cover the open windows with the no-longer-needed A/C filters to block most of the dust and pollen.
The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and resources.
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Post by papaof2 on Sept 23, 2022 19:32:54 GMT -6
There's a very scary line in that post: The state’s SB 100 law, passed in 2018, requires all of California’s electricity to come from “renewable and zero-carbon resources” by 2045 And how will that limited power source charge all the electric vehicles that another law recently mandated? It seems the democraps and tree-huggers have near-zero prctical knowledge about how things work. A solar panel's rated power is only available during part of the day and less power is available in winter than is summer. Near zero power is avaliable if there is rain, snow, or heavy clouds - but that doesn't matter - they're just running on with the assumption that whatever watts a panel have is available from sunrise to sunset (there's a PAW author who also incorporated that error in at least one of his stories - I noted that page with "BS" when I read the story. There was one Cali politician who wanted ALL houses to have solar panels - and obviously had done NO research on how many houses were shaded by trees or other structures. Unfortunately, the libiots out there continue to vote in ignorant/stupid/whatever people whose great ideas are 90% b.
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