@ottaross Was it down for maintenance reasons? We just had a transfer switch installed so we can plug in our EcoFlow batteries to power 6 essential circuits during a power outage. We also have 400W of portable solar panels to extend the usage time of the batteries and a small generator as a last resort. We lost power for over 6 days following the derecho and we resolved to have something in place for the inevitable outages to come.
@Aussiemandias I think it was a non-scheduled outage of some kind - probably random eqpt failure, squirrels or construction accident.
Sounds like a nice backup setup. I have an non-connected battery and solar setup for playing around since the derecho days. But it's more of a set it up situation in case of a sustained problem. The car-plus-inverter saved us on that last event.
@ottaross Likewise: we had the car inverter get us mostly through those 6+ days and lucky I had a 1000watt model because our neighbour asked if he could run his fridge off it as well. Some grumblings from one neighbour about us idling our car. It wasn't that much but at least next time we should be able to avoid engines for the duration of most outages.
@ottaross let me guess. You had just enough time to silence all the screaming UPS units before it came back on. That's how it generally works around here. 😃
@kaybee335 Actually it's made me realize I should get a real UPS. The down side of a reliable grid is that I would've got almost no use of a UPS in the past five years - makes me complacent.
@ottaross Yes, it looks nasty. Winter is a bad time for this, because most of our furnaces won't run without electricity, even if they use natural gas for the actual heating. Stay warm!
@ottaross@johnefrancis@geekingirl Great origin story! My 11-year-old is a promising artist and animator. I might challenge him to come up with something.
Maybe SquirrelPronoun can retain some characteristics of plasma? Like emitting UV light and conductivity? Pretty much some lightning-related abilities of Thor, which they really underrated in recent movies. Things should explode into smoking gibbs when hit by plasma.
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