Power Outage
Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 5:24 pm
With the high winds yesterday, we lost power here at Tiresmoke Central. While the webserver is on a battery backup, it's only meant to keep things up in the event of a short outage. I'm guessing it went down somewhere mid-afternoon. No biggie, right?
First Energy has a website that shows the current outages by County and then down to the township level. On Wednesday afternoon, it said power would be restored by 8am tomorrow morning. This would be a nuisance since it wasn't too cold out (no pipe freezing) , and it wasn't raining so I wasn't worried about my sump pump. (although the crock in the basement was pretty full) So I spent the night without power, and the house was still 59* when I woke up at 6:30 this morning, still without power. I checked First Energy's site again and now it says power won't be restored until 11pm FRIDAY.
I can go a night without power, and could've even tolerated it being off all today. But the forecast is calling for lows in the 20s/30s, maybe even some snow accumulation. I was gonna have to do something. When Tiresmoke Central was built, I had to have the main panel in the house expanded, and I made sure to add a generator input and transfer switch when the work was done. So, I called off work on a mission to find a generator. I went to Home Depot in Mayfield, and I heard an employee telling someone else they don't stock them there for a variety of reasons, but that Chardon or Mentor did stock them. Costco sells generators, so I went over there next. It was 8:30am, but they dont open till 10am.
Maybe I could rent one? I txted GMJohnny to see if they rented generators. He called back within a couple minutes and said they had one left, in Middlefield, and he already put my name down for it! Sweet!! At first I thought he said it was a 7500 watt unit, but it was only 3500 watt, which is a little light for a well pump, a furnace, and sump pump, etc. It would take some manual mangement. But for $35/day, figuring on 2 days, no problem. Just to keep things interesting, they don't supply the power cord to connect to the house input because there can be all different kinds of setups. So, the guy at the Middlefield store suggested Mars Electric in Chardon. Another $75 later, I had 3 connectors, and 10 feet of appropriate size cable. Some assembly required.
It's not quite 10am yet, and I'm back home with everything I need. Maybe I can get this up and running and get to work for a 1/2 day. I assemble my cord, wheel the generator to the side of the house, get it started and plug in my cable. *CLICK* -- the circuit breaker on the generator trips immediately. Crap -- what's wrong? I check the box in the basement.. (side note: I have a long-ish ranch house. Electrical panel on the north end, basement exit at the south end, house exits are at south end. It's about the longest possible path to go from the panel in the basement to the generator outside at north end) Trransfer switch is set correctly, I've turned off all the breakers in my panel, and it's still tripping the breaker/GFCI on the generator.
My next door neighbor sees me messing with the stuff and offers to help. After checking the connections in my cord and eliminating each hot leg (one at a time) and still tripping, we disconnect the ground leg.. IT WORKS! Turn on the well pump so I can flush the toilets. Once they re-fill, I turn on the furnace to start getting the house warmed up. Then the sump pump kicks on, and too much draw on the generator and the breaker flips. Another walk outside, reset the breaker one more time. It's been more than an hour assembling and troubleshooting everything. But I finally had power!!
At this point, I had the internet back up and was checking out the Tiresmoke webserver. It checked out good and I even made a quick backup while I was at it. Everything was going good at this point. And about 20 minutes later, the neighbor comes back over to tell me the power was back on. 35 hours ahead of schedule.
So between the electical cord/connectors and a 1/2 day generator rental (little over $100 total), I managed to get 20 good minutes of backup power!!
-Dave
First Energy has a website that shows the current outages by County and then down to the township level. On Wednesday afternoon, it said power would be restored by 8am tomorrow morning. This would be a nuisance since it wasn't too cold out (no pipe freezing) , and it wasn't raining so I wasn't worried about my sump pump. (although the crock in the basement was pretty full) So I spent the night without power, and the house was still 59* when I woke up at 6:30 this morning, still without power. I checked First Energy's site again and now it says power won't be restored until 11pm FRIDAY.
I can go a night without power, and could've even tolerated it being off all today. But the forecast is calling for lows in the 20s/30s, maybe even some snow accumulation. I was gonna have to do something. When Tiresmoke Central was built, I had to have the main panel in the house expanded, and I made sure to add a generator input and transfer switch when the work was done. So, I called off work on a mission to find a generator. I went to Home Depot in Mayfield, and I heard an employee telling someone else they don't stock them there for a variety of reasons, but that Chardon or Mentor did stock them. Costco sells generators, so I went over there next. It was 8:30am, but they dont open till 10am.
Maybe I could rent one? I txted GMJohnny to see if they rented generators. He called back within a couple minutes and said they had one left, in Middlefield, and he already put my name down for it! Sweet!! At first I thought he said it was a 7500 watt unit, but it was only 3500 watt, which is a little light for a well pump, a furnace, and sump pump, etc. It would take some manual mangement. But for $35/day, figuring on 2 days, no problem. Just to keep things interesting, they don't supply the power cord to connect to the house input because there can be all different kinds of setups. So, the guy at the Middlefield store suggested Mars Electric in Chardon. Another $75 later, I had 3 connectors, and 10 feet of appropriate size cable. Some assembly required.
It's not quite 10am yet, and I'm back home with everything I need. Maybe I can get this up and running and get to work for a 1/2 day. I assemble my cord, wheel the generator to the side of the house, get it started and plug in my cable. *CLICK* -- the circuit breaker on the generator trips immediately. Crap -- what's wrong? I check the box in the basement.. (side note: I have a long-ish ranch house. Electrical panel on the north end, basement exit at the south end, house exits are at south end. It's about the longest possible path to go from the panel in the basement to the generator outside at north end) Trransfer switch is set correctly, I've turned off all the breakers in my panel, and it's still tripping the breaker/GFCI on the generator.
My next door neighbor sees me messing with the stuff and offers to help. After checking the connections in my cord and eliminating each hot leg (one at a time) and still tripping, we disconnect the ground leg.. IT WORKS! Turn on the well pump so I can flush the toilets. Once they re-fill, I turn on the furnace to start getting the house warmed up. Then the sump pump kicks on, and too much draw on the generator and the breaker flips. Another walk outside, reset the breaker one more time. It's been more than an hour assembling and troubleshooting everything. But I finally had power!!
At this point, I had the internet back up and was checking out the Tiresmoke webserver. It checked out good and I even made a quick backup while I was at it. Everything was going good at this point. And about 20 minutes later, the neighbor comes back over to tell me the power was back on. 35 hours ahead of schedule.
So between the electical cord/connectors and a 1/2 day generator rental (little over $100 total), I managed to get 20 good minutes of backup power!!
-Dave