Where I live, we seem to lose power every time a squirrel farts. With a sump pump in basement, there’s always concern. We finally got a whole house generator. Best. Thing. Ever. I’m taking it with me if we ever move from here.
My power rarely goes out. Except it’s gone out twice in five days. The first time, I had to go into the office to work to support and after hours system release. Amazing how fast things go when you have a T1 internet line all to yourself
@ironcheftoni I uh… Please clarify. A T1 line at 1.544 Mbps was amazing… When I could use it at the school because it was a dedicated line to the entire school. In like. 1998. And we all had 56K modems at home.
My DSL in the boondocks is faster. And it’s bad. You must have something else
@unksol maybe so. That’s not my group that maintains that network. Whatever, I had a network that was meant to handle internet traffic for 250 people all to myself.
@ironcheftoni wasnt trying to be pendantic. That literally did take me back because we did have a T1 line at school and back then… It was fantastic especially when you were the only one on it during the summer/after hours cause you were helping
These days when people can get gigabit over copper if their cable company doesn’t suck… Not usually a thing. I’m out here in the sticks though with cable a mile away. DSL with 8mbps down/one up. I’m sure there are still hard links paid for by companies with crazy fast speeds
@ironcheftoni@unksol Huh… I’m out in the sticks (5.5 miles to the nearest gas station/mini-mart, 12 miles to the nearest supermarket, restaurant, etc). But I have DSL with 40 down/10 up.
I guess I shouldn’t whine.
@ironcheftoni@macromeh it’s a mile to the nearest gas station/small grocery store but it’s a lake community of 1300 people. THEY have cable Internet. But not worth it to run down the country road to me. To sparse, and I guess I’m too far from the DSL node OR they are too cheap to upgrade.
“Town” is only 10 minutes. Kroger/Walmart/rural King. Etc. 40K last I checked.
AEP ran fiber past my house a few years ago. But. IDK what its for. Was hoping they were building a network to lease.
It’s workable but if there were more people than me here… It would be unpleasant on the upload especially .
Oh and before I bought the house I specifically asked the cable company if they provided service at that address. Because work from home. After I bought it and requested service no. So. You know. Fuck them
@unksol Might be worth checking to see if TMobile has enough bars to give you reasonable bandwidth via a 5G box. I know a couple of people who have been pleasantly surprised about that. (And several others whose options are, shall we say, more constrained.)
@werehatrack I actually did tmobile via a trial once where they sent you a free wireless modem because I wanted to test it.
It worked great, I wanted to use it as a backup or even primary. Especially when DSL got really shitty over and I had to nag them to get a tech for weeks when it rained… Flooded node. But T-Mobile refuses to sell “home Internet” in my area. Ok. Well you shipped me this modem for free. Let me buy a few GB when I need it. Nope won’t let me register the modem they sent me. Or pay them.
But I agree if you can get T-Mobile as home Internet that’s a pretty good option. They just don’t want my money I guess
We very very rarely lose power and not for more than… idk 8-12 hours at a time in 10 years. . I’ve never lost a fridge/freezer but I think having to clean one out that spoiled would be the worst thing. Just the smell plus the cost of all that wasted meat
After a couple hours the back ups on the worklatop and modem run out. Then it’s very boring if in winter. Frustrating if you were working prod emergencies.
Also have a gas fireplace so id be fine heat wise.
If further north where I might need the heat for days, an inverter generator can run the fans on a gas forced air system for days and I’d definitely have at least a small generator
This house and the last two before that were all on wells. People take water for granted, but when you have a well, and the power goes out, there is no water.
There are work arounds for most everything else, but believe me, you have never been as inconvenienced as you are when there is no water.
Flushed? No way, or rather you can do it once.
Heat? I can put on a coat. Hot, I can take off something. Light? I can use a flashlight until the batteries die. Cooking? I have a gas grill outside. Freezer? I don’t open it, or if I have to, I make a run for dry ice, if I can get the garage door open, that is.
@Jackinga This! And if it’s wintertime, the well not only stops working, but it freezes up so that even when the power comes back on, it takes ages to get it thawed and running.
@Jackinga@Pony when I originally bought the house I filled a number of two litter bottles as I emptied them. At the time it could have been drinking water but I haven’t had to ever use them so. Two bottles to flush the toilet if it ever happened.
@Pony I don’t get the freezes up thing though? Plumping/well piping should below the frost line then brought into the heated envelope? Ateast 4 feet down here or it will freeze/expand/burst.
I guess it you were in Texas/Florida a brief freeze/crawl space but … Man that is not a good idea after what happened to Texas.
@Jackinga@unksol I can’t explain what exactly happens, that’s hubby’s department, but I know that there’s a heater in our wellhouse that if it fails, everything freezes up and we have no water. It’s happened a few times in the three years we’ve lived here.
@Pony now I’m honestly just curious. Sounds like something in the well pipe might freeze. But the pipe to the house should still have to be below the frost line or it would burst… So should the well pipe
I have an artesian well so the top of the well pipe always has water under pressure/above the frost line/freezes every winter which does slightly stress the PVC/seal but just pushes the water column down to the frost line where the connection to the house is.
Id be slightly paranoid about something freezing/breaking and having to dig the whole line to find the burst if it’s a regularish thing
@macromeh Not like Miami where the water table is usually less than eight feet below grade, and the free-flow depth can be as little as fifteen feet. At that point, a wet centrifugal at grade level can develop enough suction to pull as much water as a sprinkler system can spray around.
The normally thing I’m used to is outside the house by you know 4 feet. And the water level is down a few feet from the cap. There is a submersible pump. And a line that’s below the frost line going into the basement pressure tank.
Granted mines only ~40 feet deep and if you losen the cap a column of water will shoot out at pressure.
Obviously you can have to drill way over/have a longer run/pressure tanks in an out building/be were you don’t have a frost line normally/not have a basement/have to drill WAY deep… Etc etc
I assume if it’s inside the house you don’t use a submersible pump or… Inside just sounds like a pain? Have you ever had your pump out?
@Pony Looks like they put the well where they figured they would find the water. Where you live is the kind of place I call “scenic, but way more work than I’m going to do.”
My well head is just a 6" metal casing sticking out of the ground with an iron pipe that leads to an adjacent 4’x6’ shed. The shed houses the pressure tank, shutoff valves and piping, the well pump controller and an electrical sub-panel that powers it. A 1" buried main outlet pipe feeds the house and various hose bibs. The shed is insulated and a small electric heater and heat-tapes keep it from freezing in the winter. I also have a small propane heater in case the electric power fails, but I’ve never had to use it.
@macromeh Same here, but all the equipment you keep in your pump house/shed is in our basement instead.
We like having well water, especially since we got the UV sanitizer and an Iron-Sulfur filter last year.
We always needed a generator for the freezers and refrigerator anyway, and well water is free [except for the cost of the electricity needed to pump it].
About 10 years, the town created a water district on our road, over the objections of [a small majority of us & our neighbors], but our house is set back 1000 feet, so it would cost us $20K just to get the public water back to the house, and then more to plumb it into the house.
Best,
PA
@Jackinga I agree on the water. In my case it was the city water system. We had about 5 weeks of no water at all last year (along with about 4 mo of boil water notices). We had 8 days of no water starting 1pm Christmas eve. Sucked big time.
@PhysAssist $20K for public water? Ouch!
Our well cost $5K total for drilling (>240 ft.) and installation 25 years ago. Just this year, it required another $2700 to replace the pressure tank and various other minor updates. Doesn’t sound bad at all in comparison!
We got really lucky with our well - we live near the top of a hilly area in the NW Oregon Coast Range. Many folks in this area have problems with their wells but (so far) we have not. The water comes right out of the ground sweet and clear, 20 gal/min, no filters or treatment needed. We get only very minor signs of iron and calcium on the shower heads. After all these years, I can barely stomach the chlorinated crap the city pumps any more.
@macromeh We’re already forced into paying for an equal share of the cost of the water district’s installation as a surcharge on our tax bills annually, even though we voted against it and can/will nerve use it.
The $20K would just be the cost of trenching the line back from the road to our house, paying for the water meter, and hooking it all up to the water main.
Over the 30 years that we’ve lived in the woods, our water has been great 95% of the time, but every so often- usually when it’s been brutally hot for some weeks, and the water level in the well must be at it’s lowest ebb, we get the slightest hint of a sulfur odor.
It still tastes good, but you can tell it’s not the same.
We also did/do get some small amount of calcium and iron staining, we wanted to protect and extend the life of our appliances, and I’m kind of a nut about wanting the water to be bacteria-free, hence the addition of the UV-C sanitizer and iron-sulfur filter, which hasn’t affected the taste of our water as far as we can tell.
We definitely agree about the taste of chlorinated ‘city’ water.
Best,
PA
@Pony Tick tick tock. Sounds nerve racking. Was just reading about an elderly man who lives in an iron lung still. Guess its hard to get parts to repair it but also imagine how he feels when power goes out?
@Pony I’m surprised you weren’t provided bottled oxygen when your home unit arrived. If it was covered by your medical insurance, reach out to them and inquire about a backup tank. Also, a pulse regulator is what you want as opposed to constant flow, as the bottle will last much longer at any flow rate. Seriously…look into that. Your life may literally depend on it.
If you wall want to deep-creep and find out where I live within two zip codes… The forced outage that AEP forced my neighbors and I to endure after a crazy storm ravaged most of their customers, but since we live in the city, it basically gets really broken up by the time it hits us or else “OH SHIT.”
We survived. Or, so we thought. Because none us US lost power, despite the exurbs fucked right up. Then, all of the sudden… no power.
“The demand on the grid would have caused irreparable damage and therefore it is off.”
BUMFUCK OHIO. NOT California with rolling blackouts. The same area that uses that same amount of electricity on any July month.
I had to have my brother AND my parents bring their generators. I was running 3 tanks of propane 24/7 with fans in my bedroom for us 3 to actually sleep. Only giving power to the fridge and chest freezer.
My neighbors who did not have 3 daisy-chained 1500w generators had to stay in hotels and lost ALL THEIR FOOD. Fuck AEP.
As long as it’s not cold out, I really don’t mind it. But my power never goes out. My dad is my biggest concern. His power goes out at least once a year, when a fricken squirrel eats the generator line. Just happened a couple weekends ago. He’s blind and uses medical equipment so it’s impossible to move him. I had to sit with him all day till the power came back on but they get to him pretty fast bc of the medical equipment.
No power.
No climate control. I need that fan to sleep dammit.
Where I live, we seem to lose power every time a squirrel farts. With a sump pump in basement, there’s always concern. We finally got a whole house generator. Best. Thing. Ever. I’m taking it with me if we ever move from here.
@karlajoy Sump pump is my biggest worry too
Having to restock the fridge and freezer if everything spoils due to an extended outage.
@IndifferentDude and having no (viable) recourse for compensation.
Taking a dump in the dark, if you can even find your way there. For this reason, I try to sleep with a flashlight at hand.
My power rarely goes out. Except it’s gone out twice in five days. The first time, I had to go into the office to work to support and after hours system release. Amazing how fast things go when you have a T1 internet line all to yourself
@ironcheftoni I uh… Please clarify. A T1 line at 1.544 Mbps was amazing… When I could use it at the school because it was a dedicated line to the entire school. In like. 1998. And we all had 56K modems at home.
My DSL in the boondocks is faster. And it’s bad. You must have something else
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
@unksol maybe so. That’s not my group that maintains that network. Whatever, I had a network that was meant to handle internet traffic for 250 people all to myself.
@ironcheftoni wasnt trying to be pendantic. That literally did take me back because we did have a T1 line at school and back then… It was fantastic especially when you were the only one on it during the summer/after hours cause you were helping
These days when people can get gigabit over copper if their cable company doesn’t suck… Not usually a thing. I’m out here in the sticks though with cable a mile away. DSL with 8mbps down/one up. I’m sure there are still hard links paid for by companies with crazy fast speeds
@ironcheftoni @unksol Huh… I’m out in the sticks (5.5 miles to the nearest gas station/mini-mart, 12 miles to the nearest supermarket, restaurant, etc). But I have DSL with 40 down/10 up.
I guess I shouldn’t whine.
@ironcheftoni @macromeh it’s a mile to the nearest gas station/small grocery store but it’s a lake community of 1300 people. THEY have cable Internet. But not worth it to run down the country road to me. To sparse, and I guess I’m too far from the DSL node OR they are too cheap to upgrade.
“Town” is only 10 minutes. Kroger/Walmart/rural King. Etc. 40K last I checked.
AEP ran fiber past my house a few years ago. But. IDK what its for. Was hoping they were building a network to lease.
It’s workable but if there were more people than me here… It would be unpleasant on the upload especially .
Oh and before I bought the house I specifically asked the cable company if they provided service at that address. Because work from home. After I bought it and requested service no. So. You know. Fuck them
@unksol Might be worth checking to see if TMobile has enough bars to give you reasonable bandwidth via a 5G box. I know a couple of people who have been pleasantly surprised about that. (And several others whose options are, shall we say, more constrained.)
@werehatrack I actually did tmobile via a trial once where they sent you a free wireless modem because I wanted to test it.
It worked great, I wanted to use it as a backup or even primary. Especially when DSL got really shitty over and I had to nag them to get a tech for weeks when it rained… Flooded node. But T-Mobile refuses to sell “home Internet” in my area. Ok. Well you shipped me this modem for free. Let me buy a few GB when I need it. Nope won’t let me register the modem they sent me. Or pay them.
But I agree if you can get T-Mobile as home Internet that’s a pretty good option. They just don’t want my money I guess
The knowledge that some POS is going to take the opportunity to do a drive-by on my street.
And no heat or AC.
We very very rarely lose power and not for more than… idk 8-12 hours at a time in 10 years. . I’ve never lost a fridge/freezer but I think having to clean one out that spoiled would be the worst thing. Just the smell plus the cost of all that wasted meat
After a couple hours the back ups on the worklatop and modem run out. Then it’s very boring if in winter. Frustrating if you were working prod emergencies.
Also have a gas fireplace so id be fine heat wise.
If further north where I might need the heat for days, an inverter generator can run the fans on a gas forced air system for days and I’d definitely have at least a small generator
My CPAP stops working.
This house and the last two before that were all on wells. People take water for granted, but when you have a well, and the power goes out, there is no water.
There are work arounds for most everything else, but believe me, you have never been as inconvenienced as you are when there is no water.
Flushed? No way, or rather you can do it once.
Heat? I can put on a coat. Hot, I can take off something. Light? I can use a flashlight until the batteries die. Cooking? I have a gas grill outside. Freezer? I don’t open it, or if I have to, I make a run for dry ice, if I can get the garage door open, that is.
Water? Accept no substitute. It’s the Real Thing.
@Jackinga This! And if it’s wintertime, the well not only stops working, but it freezes up so that even when the power comes back on, it takes ages to get it thawed and running.
@Jackinga @Pony when I originally bought the house I filled a number of two litter bottles as I emptied them. At the time it could have been drinking water but I haven’t had to ever use them so. Two bottles to flush the toilet if it ever happened.
@Pony I don’t get the freezes up thing though? Plumping/well piping should below the frost line then brought into the heated envelope? Ateast 4 feet down here or it will freeze/expand/burst.
I guess it you were in Texas/Florida a brief freeze/crawl space but … Man that is not a good idea after what happened to Texas.
@Jackinga @unksol I can’t explain what exactly happens, that’s hubby’s department, but I know that there’s a heater in our wellhouse that if it fails, everything freezes up and we have no water. It’s happened a few times in the three years we’ve lived here.
@Pony now I’m honestly just curious. Sounds like something in the well pipe might freeze. But the pipe to the house should still have to be below the frost line or it would burst… So should the well pipe
I have an artesian well so the top of the well pipe always has water under pressure/above the frost line/freezes every winter which does slightly stress the PVC/seal but just pushes the water column down to the frost line where the connection to the house is.
Id be slightly paranoid about something freezing/breaking and having to dig the whole line to find the burst if it’s a regularish thing
@Jackinga I’m with you there. I bitch about my water/sewer bill, but I’ll take running water over power any time.
@Jackinga @Pony @unksol
I not trying to sound like an asshole but why are some wells built outside instead of inside the house?
@Jackinga @Pony @Star2236 @unksol My well pump is 242 feet down. I don’t know how they would ever service it if there was a house on top of it.
@macromeh Not like Miami where the water table is usually less than eight feet below grade, and the free-flow depth can be as little as fifteen feet. At that point, a wet centrifugal at grade level can develop enough suction to pull as much water as a sprinkler system can spray around.
@Jackinga @macromeh @Pony @Star2236 now I’m just curious about how people’s wells are set up.
The normally thing I’m used to is outside the house by you know 4 feet. And the water level is down a few feet from the cap. There is a submersible pump. And a line that’s below the frost line going into the basement pressure tank.
Granted mines only ~40 feet deep and if you losen the cap a column of water will shoot out at pressure.
Obviously you can have to drill way over/have a longer run/pressure tanks in an out building/be were you don’t have a frost line normally/not have a basement/have to drill WAY deep… Etc etc
I assume if it’s inside the house you don’t use a submersible pump or… Inside just sounds like a pain? Have you ever had your pump out?
@Jackinga @macromeh @Star2236 @unksol Our wellhouse is the tiny building way down the hill from the house. That’s all I know. lol
@Pony Looks like they put the well where they figured they would find the water. Where you live is the kind of place I call “scenic, but way more work than I’m going to do.”
@Pony @werehatrack looks pretty. Probably explains the freezing.
I will admit to being lazy although if Ive got someone around to motivate me it goes better. Me by myself… Eh. I’ll get to it
My well head is just a 6" metal casing sticking out of the ground with an iron pipe that leads to an adjacent 4’x6’ shed. The shed houses the pressure tank, shutoff valves and piping, the well pump controller and an electrical sub-panel that powers it. A 1" buried main outlet pipe feeds the house and various hose bibs. The shed is insulated and a small electric heater and heat-tapes keep it from freezing in the winter. I also have a small propane heater in case the electric power fails, but I’ve never had to use it.
@macromeh Same here, but all the equipment you keep in your pump house/shed is in our basement instead.
We like having well water, especially since we got the UV sanitizer and an Iron-Sulfur filter last year.
We always needed a generator for the freezers and refrigerator anyway, and well water is free [except for the cost of the electricity needed to pump it].
About 10 years, the town created a water district on our road, over the objections of [a small majority of us & our neighbors], but our house is set back 1000 feet, so it would cost us $20K just to get the public water back to the house, and then more to plumb it into the house.
Best,
PA
@Jackinga I agree on the water. In my case it was the city water system. We had about 5 weeks of no water at all last year (along with about 4 mo of boil water notices). We had 8 days of no water starting 1pm Christmas eve. Sucked big time.
@PhysAssist $20K for public water? Ouch!
Our well cost $5K total for drilling (>240 ft.) and installation 25 years ago. Just this year, it required another $2700 to replace the pressure tank and various other minor updates. Doesn’t sound bad at all in comparison!
We got really lucky with our well - we live near the top of a hilly area in the NW Oregon Coast Range. Many folks in this area have problems with their wells but (so far) we have not. The water comes right out of the ground sweet and clear, 20 gal/min, no filters or treatment needed. We get only very minor signs of iron and calcium on the shower heads. After all these years, I can barely stomach the chlorinated crap the city pumps any more.
@macromeh We’re already forced into paying for an equal share of the cost of the water district’s installation as a surcharge on our tax bills annually, even though we voted against it and can/will nerve use it.
The $20K would just be the cost of trenching the line back from the road to our house, paying for the water meter, and hooking it all up to the water main.
Over the 30 years that we’ve lived in the woods, our water has been great 95% of the time, but every so often- usually when it’s been brutally hot for some weeks, and the water level in the well must be at it’s lowest ebb, we get the slightest hint of a sulfur odor.
It still tastes good, but you can tell it’s not the same.
We also did/do get some small amount of calcium and iron staining, we wanted to protect and extend the life of our appliances, and I’m kind of a nut about wanting the water to be bacteria-free, hence the addition of the UV-C sanitizer and iron-sulfur filter, which hasn’t affected the taste of our water as far as we can tell.
We definitely agree about the taste of chlorinated ‘city’ water.
Best,
PA
Replacing $500 worth of food in the basement freezer
Stressing about the cold food
The never ending heat! I live in Florida.
No hot water to shower.
Worrying about whether I have enough battery life on my portable oxygen machine to last until my home machine comes back on.
@Pony Tick tick tock. Sounds nerve racking. Was just reading about an elderly man who lives in an iron lung still. Guess its hard to get parts to repair it but also imagine how he feels when power goes out?
@Pony I’m surprised you weren’t provided bottled oxygen when your home unit arrived. If it was covered by your medical insurance, reach out to them and inquire about a backup tank. Also, a pulse regulator is what you want as opposed to constant flow, as the bottle will last much longer at any flow rate. Seriously…look into that. Your life may literally depend on it.
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
No A/C or heat.
The deafening sound of ALL my UPSs going off at the same time!
@emspace BeEEPeep eepeep BeEEPeep eepeep
If you wall want to deep-creep and find out where I live within two zip codes… The forced outage that AEP forced my neighbors and I to endure after a crazy storm ravaged most of their customers, but since we live in the city, it basically gets really broken up by the time it hits us or else “OH SHIT.”
We survived. Or, so we thought. Because none us US lost power, despite the exurbs fucked right up. Then, all of the sudden… no power.
“The demand on the grid would have caused irreparable damage and therefore it is off.”
BUMFUCK OHIO. NOT California with rolling blackouts. The same area that uses that same amount of electricity on any July month.
I had to have my brother AND my parents bring their generators. I was running 3 tanks of propane 24/7 with fans in my bedroom for us 3 to actually sleep. Only giving power to the fridge and chest freezer.
My neighbors who did not have 3 daisy-chained 1500w generators had to stay in hotels and lost ALL THEIR FOOD. Fuck AEP.
As long as it’s not cold out, I really don’t mind it. But my power never goes out. My dad is my biggest concern. His power goes out at least once a year, when a fricken squirrel eats the generator line. Just happened a couple weekends ago. He’s blind and uses medical equipment so it’s impossible to move him. I had to sit with him all day till the power came back on but they get to him pretty fast bc of the medical equipment.
Truly ALL of the ABOVE & then some!!!