Ice man cometh

[hoss]

Since '96 we've survived 3 big hurricanes, a massive snowstorm, severe drought and now a devastating ice storm. I used to think NC weather was pretty stable! All in all we are thankful that nothing hit the house but we got a lot of trees down and a lot bent over. Needless to say the 2200 has been put to work straightening trees and hauling stuff out to the burn site. Made my workload alot more manageable and was able to get my property looking "back to normal" alot sooner. Interesting note, a 3" diameter, fairly short pine tree branch with lots of needles with ice on them was amazingly heavy to pick up, makes sense why these 80' pines leaned over and bust in half, I'll take lots of snow over a little ice any day.....

 

[frank_f15]

hoss: glad noting major to your home. a very good friend lives in winston salem told her the same thing, we get lots of snow and will take that over ice anytime. we have ice storms and they are very destructive.

 

[riptides]

Just go ask our Canadian friends what they think of ice.
We are talking weeks and weeks of power outages from their last big one.

The ice man is scheduled for us starting tonight.
Central Virginia.

-Mike Z.

 

[manganos]

N.C must have had a great deal of ice. They asked me at work (Verizon) if I would go help get customers back in service down there. We hardly ever go SOUTH to help with winter weather and this is only December Who says money doesn't fall out of the sky!

 

[grandad]

Welcome to TBN, Gary. We're over here in Greensboro where we picked up maybe 6 inches of snow and ice... first snow, then about 1/2 inch of ice. Did a number on branches, small/weak trees and power lines. But just a few miles away in Burlington, where I work, it seems like the storm had more ice and there were lots more big trees brought down.

I recall driving into Raleigh in the midst of one of those hurricanes. If your damage is anything like that, you will be busy for weeks to come. All the best to you... be safe working around that stuff.

 

[chim]

He's stopping by our part of PA today. Didn't even bother going outside this AM. Need studded shoes to stay upright. May give it a whirl if the salt/cinder truck goes down the road, but the weatherman on a local TV station says we're only seeing the beginning. Lots more to come from the South, and temps to be below the freezing mark till late in the day. Right now we have roughly 1/4" of glaze over everything outside.

Just gonna sit tight till we see how things pan out. The generator isn't exactly as automatic as it will be when 100% done. Explaining to Wifey how to make it work over the phone would make me look like the guy in the tower trying to tell Buddy Hackett how to land the plane in "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World". She's a bright girl, and we enjoy each other more now than back in '67 when we met, but sometimes on things technical we seem to talk slightly different languages.........................chim

 

[MikePA]

chim, you and I are in the same boat. I brought my portable generator into a heated area instead of sitting on the front porch where it runs when we need it. (It's on wheels so it's easy to move) On the way home from work yesterday I stopped by the hardware store and bought a 9' 220v extension cord that had the proper plug on it to fit my generator. I also bought a dryer cord for the other end. I spliced in some 12 ga wire between these two ends so it'll reach from the front porch, in through a basement window and over to the dryer outlet. It's not pretty, but it'll do until I can create something permanent. We had been running extension cords which worked fine, but this didn't supply power to the well pump or the water heater.

I stayed home as well and for the same reason you did. Trying to explain how to hook it up over the phone would be difficult plus sometimes the generator is hard to start (pull start).

 

[Hoeman00]

What amperage are u running on 12ga. wire?
Shouldn't be over 20 amps.
U don't want wire to become the fuse or
worse.

 

[chim]

The salt trucks came through, temps rose, and I got cabin fever - having lunch at work right now.

We have an LPG genset with auto start, transfer switch, battery charger, etc. What I don't have is a solenoid for the gas - it's a manual operation. The other thing I didn't get around to is running the critical loads to a subpanel. After isolating the house from the utility, I do some quick "magic" wiring in the basement............chim