We went through yet another snow storm yesterday, one that started late Thursday afternoon and lasted through Friday. We received about 7 inches here at The Gulch, a not unusual amount of snow. We also received another power outage, the fourth one in about six weeks.
This wasn’t a lengthy outage like the previous one, lasting about an hour and a half. That didn’t mean I didn’t pull out the Official Weekend Pundit Generator and fire it up, though.
That I’ve had to use the generator as many times as I have in such a short time has me wondering just how bad it might get. It seems that every winter storm we’ve experienced so far has led to a power outage, the longest one lasting a little over 22 hours. It isn’t like we’ve had large amounts of heavy snow or an ice storm causing tree limbs to break and knock out power lines. In one case all we had was rain, but with high winds.
It makes me wonder whether the power company hasn’t been doing enough tree trimming or if we’re seeing a cascade effect where one storm damages tree limbs and a following storm causes the damaged limbs to finally come down and take out the power. I suppose it could be both.
We have yet another storm on its way, forecast to start sometime Sunday evening and run through late Monday afternoon/early evening. It will be very similar to this last storm, with a similar amount of snowfall predicted. Therefore, I am predicting we will lose power during this next storm as well.
As such, I will be making slightly different preparations, those being pre-positioning the Official Weekend Pundit Generator and propane tank such that I won’t have to move the WP Mom’s car out of the way in order to get the generator out of the garage. I won’t need to clean off and move the trusty RAM 1500 out of the way so I can get the WP Mom’s car out of the garage so I can move the generator. That means I can get it set up and running in less than 5 minutes rather than the 20 minutes it took last night.
As I wrote above, I’ve had to fire up the Official Weekend Pundit Generator four times since the beginning to December. I’ve had the generator for over three years and the only other times I’ve had to fire it up was to test it – usually once every 6 weeks or so, and then only for 5 or 10 minutes.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, The Gulch doesn’t use a lot of power which means the Official Weekend Pundit Generator doesn’t use a lot of fuel, a bit less than a half gallon of propane an hour. Therefore, a full 40 lb. propane tank will last almost a full day.
A Note: I am not trying to diminish the winter weather being experienced by the folks in the Midwest. Our weather here is rather mild as compared to what we usually experience during winter. I just find it unusual that such relatively mild winter weather has had such a large effect on our electrical grid.
