We Finally Have Electricity Again

Lightning storms yesterday started about forty brushfires in the low foothills of southwestern Idaho. One consequence was that we lost electric power this morning about 10:30 AM, as one of the pieces of transmission equipment burned. For a while, there was no electric power from Horseshoe Bend to near McCall--which is a long ways north of here. (However, that meant only about 13,000 homes.)

Anyway, I suffered the indignity of having to actually go into work because of this. I have a backup generator to power the essential house circuits, and backup power supplies for the computers. But my ISP apparently does not have backup power on the antenna that my wireless service talks to--or perhaps somewhere upstream of that antenna doesn't have backup power. The result was that I had working computers (at least for a while), but no Internet connection, so no way to work. Grrrr!

At the end of the day, I came home, and decided that my wife needed a meal out. So we drove down to Horseshoe Bend, expecting that at least some of the restaurants would have backup generators. Nope! We ended up going into what used to be the Riverside Restaurant, but is now Kit's Steakhouse, where the employees of El Durango were waiting to order their dinner. The only dishes available at Kit's were hamburgers and hot dogs--barbecued outside. The good news is that we each had a hamburger with a side (coleslaw for my wife, and potato salad for me), and beer for my wife--and the bill came to $9.56. I can't complain. As near as I can tell, Kalac's Market was the only significant business with backup power.

I am thinking very seriously about upgrading my power systems. As usual, we had some wind blowing the whole day. I'm thinking of wind generators and battery backup--perhaps about 2-3 kilowatts of capacity. In conjunction with the 7 kilowatt LP gas generator, this would be sufficient to operate the essential circuits, plus the air conditioning compressor. At night, as power demands drop, we might be able to cut back to just battery backup to run the compressor, and turn off the LP gas generator.