who else?

no power, no phone, no water, no internet.

please send truckloads of seasoned hickory and locust

seriously, our area in upstate ny was hit hard, but it was all wind. very little rain. i'm on the end of a rural service and i always lose power and i'm always the last to get hooked back up. no trees fell on the family, house or cars so that's a plus. being an addict i had to crooze around a little yesterday with my saws gassed up.

i'm here at work trying to report the outages, check email and catch the news. i'm imagining there are some members here who are yet to get back online. even cell phone voice sevice is out across huge swaths of the northeast.

I hope you get your power back soon, onetracker. We lost ours for a few days last year and it was no fun.

I am with you, no power, and the power company has no plans on fixing it this week. However, I will stay on the bright side and report the following positives:

1) Electrician friend came over and installed a transfer switch at cost for me.
2) Local farm supply store had 8000 watt generators in stock and no price gauging.
3) I can power up my house for water and hot showers and keep the fridge running.
4) It has been so warm here I don't even need to burn

and most importantly (besides the fact that everyone here is safe)

5) My brand new woodshed that I built a month ago is 100% intact.

Therefore I will take this time to reflect on the good, and when I finally see the power company trucks I will bring them donuts.

Once I can get some power I will try to share some pictures of the free wood available now.

I lucked out on this one being more inland but coming from LA I can empathize with you. It's great to have friends or family helping in the repair/recovery process. I came to realize how something you take for granted like basic utilities are actually a luxury when you think about it...hope your losses are minimal, we pray for you....

my power went out for about 30 hours. i bought a generator a long time ago and use it every year when either a hurricane, thunderstorm, tornado or snows hit the Chesapeake shore. mine is only a little 5600 wattt craftsman with 8000 surge. i have it back fed into the breaker box and run the whole house with selection of either water or hot water heater.....won't do both at the same time. thinking about getting one a little larger as this one doesn't run the hvac either. problems are once you start jumping in watts, it also jumps in $$.

cass

cass, If you already know this, OK, I don't want to sound condescending. I just want to make sure that you know that back feeding a breaker in your panel is a serious code violation, breaking the utility's rules, and could be very dangerous to linemen working on an outage. I know, only if you make a mistake and don't have the main shut off. However, the electrical code and utility rules only allow feeding your house panel with a generator by use of a "Transfer Switch". It eliminates the possibility of a mistake on your part, or someone else unknowingly. I just don't want anyone to get hurt.

Glad you came thru OK.
Sounds like the maintenance crews have weeks of work to get power back to many places.
It'll be like camping in a house for you for a few days.
Hang in there,

Onetracker, I hope you get power back quickly. It is these times when we really appreciate the power companies.

thanks chief, didn't really know about the code. ill look into getting a switch. right now, i just cut the main off and then turn on the breaker to the generator. backing out, the gen switch goes off, then the main comes on.

thanks for the heads up.

cass

last October after our snowstorm we were out of power for 6 days...the night the power company was here hooking us back up, they went door to door
and actually went in peoples houses to make sure they had transfer switches and were not back feeding the lines...said they wouldnt hook anything up till they
checked every house on the street that had a generator running

thanks everybody. we'll be a few more days yet i think. its really not that bad without power...especially in winter cuz you don't need refrigeration. we put everything on the porch in coolers, freeze it solid over night and put it back in the freezer. milk and leftovers go in a cooler full of snow. we cook with campstoves and have the woodstoves cranking. it's in the warm weather that i hate losing power. good thing i didn't have 2 deer in the freezer. that would be a heart breaker.

They actually now make kits that go on your existing panel so you don't even have to put in a separate transfer switch box. Here is an example. They are made for most modern brand panels. http://www.interlockkit.com/

thank you sir....looks like a snap. i'll be sure to get one.

cass