How do you prep for future power outages?

[Oaktree]

I don't need a whole house generator, because my house runs fine without electricity, but I do keep a portable and a couple hundred pounds of propane around for various reasons. I can go years between needing a generator, so propane removes the bad fuel worry. I do have a little camp generator that will run the fridge or freezer. It runs 4.5 hours on a gallon of gas, so a couple cans of lawnmower gas will last for days.

Yeah, we can get along pretty well without electricity too...the house is ~200 yr old, so for most of its existence there was no electricity (I figure it came thru here sometime in the 1930s) anyway. Water is gravity-fed, propane kitchen stove and HW heater, woodstove for heat. I do keep a 4kW gasoline generator to keep the refrigerator & freezer cold...I'll run it for a half hour 2 or 3 times a day or as needed. Other than that, LED lanterns, or headlamp and read a book once it gets dark.
We've only had one power outage that lasted more than a couple hours in the 16 years we've been here. I do run the generator into a load for 20 min or so twice a year.

 

[MossRoad]

Only once have I had to run a generator because of a power outage which was Hurricane Ike in '08. We were three days without electricity then. Generator ran the refrigerator, freezer, tv, lamp, and couple fans. Got lucky and was able to get enough gas to run it. How many generators do you keep? How many cans of gas? How long will the gas be good?

Sounds like you don't need that large of a generator. We have a very old 4500w Coleman generator. It's loud and runs at 3600rpms. I'd look for a quieter generator if I had to do it over again. But it works fine. I keep three 6-gallon cans of gas on hand, out in a detached shed. I rotate my cans between the tractor (it's gas powered) and other gas powered equipment. The longest it sits around in the cans has been several months over winters with no snow. I've always used 87 octane 10% ethanol, and never had any problems with storage because it gets rotated out. If you're concerned with it "going bad", just pour a can into your car every couple months and refill it. That way the oldest it will ever get is 6 months with 3 cans. It'll never go bad in 6 months in a sealed can. Never.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

A UPS is a necessity if I want to keep my internet and phone up. My modem/router requires a 12 volt supply, so I have a battery tender on a 12 volt deep cycle battery in the garage, I run it through a 7812 voltage regulator, and a couple caps and fuses. The internet sails through any power dropouts with no interruptions. Cell phones and a tablet double as a computer. Of course, if the lines go down I'm on my own; no cell service at my house, but the cell phones work great VOIP. And no feeking noise box generator.

IC 7812 Voltage regulator Pin and Circuit Explained

The IC 7812 voltage regulator is commonly used as the regulated power supply in electronic circuits upto the voltage 12 V.

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[robbyr]

Sounds like you don't need that large of a generator. We have a very old 4500w Coleman generator. It's loud and runs at 3600rpms. I'd look for a quieter generator if I had to do it over again. But it works fine. I keep three 6-gallon cans of gas on hand, out in a detached shed. I rotate my cans between the tractor (it's gas powered) and other gas powered equipment. The longest it sits around in the cans has been several months over winters with no snow. I've always used 87 octane 10% ethanol, and never had any problems with storage because it gets rotated out. If you're concerned with it "going bad", just pour a can into your car every couple months and refill it. That way the oldest it will ever get is 6 months with 3 cans. It'll never go bad in 6 months in a sealed can. Never.

I think mine is a Coleman 4500.

 

[STx]

I picked up a 22kw diesel generator at an auction for $4,000 last year. It does single and 3 phase power and is enough to run the whole house as long as I'm not running the on-demand water heater, stove and heat-pump at the same time I'm trying to dry a load of laundry. I have a 100 gallon diesel tank but, I also just picked up a 1,000 fuel trailer at the auction this last week when I bought a new to me mid-size excavator with a 124 gallon fuel tank, so we should typically have at least a few days fuel on hand in the tank and if it comes to it, I can siphon fuel out of the equipment to get probably 10 more days. I've also got a Miller Bobcat that'll produce 11kw as a backup, also diesel. We're about to do some renovations to the house, when we do that I'm going to put in an automatic transfer switch and hookup the big generator with the remote start so it'll be ready at all times and should exercise itself periodically. Right now, I have to manual wire it in using my welding leads. I'm also seriously considering putting in 10kw of solar as part of the renovations, we're charged different rates for our grid power depending on the time of day and demand so the solar would help us with the peak load fees in the summer. If I do put solar in, I'd really like to install a battery bank as well but, I'm having a hard time finding a way to do it that's cost effective. The Powerwall is $$$$ and the DIY options are still pretty expensive. Our co-op does offer interest free financing on projects like that though, with the payments spread out over 10 years, so it may still pencil out if I use their money and keep mine invested, I haven't run those numbers yet.

We actually have the county emergency services radio tower on our hill and are on the same power line as it is so our feeder is high priority to keep running because of that. During the recent snowstorms (I'm in Tx), I was only without power for about 1.5 hours total, spread across 3 outages that were all under 45 minutes. I think it took them those 3 to realize they were shutting down the EMS tower, they were all the morning of the 14th, after which I had power consistently. Because of that, I probably don't need the backup power but, since I've already got the generators, it's better to have it and never use it than need it and not have it.

 

[ponytug]

Given that you live on the same line with the county EMS, batteries are probably going to be hard to pencil out, unless you use them to help time shift your loads. We used to be on a priority line, but the local utility just seems to have given up.


Solar will certainly help you time shift loads, too. If you have the space, I would look into grounds mounts as well, as they are pretty easy for someone who is handy with tools to put in, and a lot cheaper. I think that sometimes with solar, it is cheaper to overbuild on total power just to keep you off of the peak rates.

The Tesla batteries are hard to beat on price right now, unless you have an inside line to leftover golf cart batteries...they are also hard to beat on the sheer number of people using them between the cars and the homeowners, and their reliability seems to be quite good.

FWIW: Here in California, the utilities are shifting the time of use rates away from historic patterns toward 3-9pm, disfavoring solar, but favoring solar plus batteries. This might be in your future as well, though Texas power plans seem to be in a bit of a turmoil at the moment.

All the best, Peter

 

[PILOON]

I have a 1 Kw generator that always has a battery tender hooked up.
That is wired into a generator panel that is a manual switch over type.
My main concern was to save food and have water.
With 1 Kw of power I can plug in a couple of ceramic heaters to supplement the fireplace or wood stove.
Bonus is that I can also run TV and get satellite plus internet.
Downside is that I need to be here to start it up and manually switch over.

 

[Bullwinkle123]

Low budget, sometimes crazy, and high budget power outage schemes I have used in New England.

When I lived nearer the city in MA, with town water, we didn't really have a long term outage plan. In 10 years we only had one or two outage that lasted more than 24 hours and you still have running water. So the challenges there are heat if it's winter, and refrigerator otherwise.

In early years I was experimenting with solar power, not for any thing real, just one panel and one deep cycle battery. The battery, with inverter, definitely saved one Christmas eve without power.

When we had some of the longer outages where we worried about the contents of the refrigerator melting, we kept it closed tight, and I would, every some number of hours, run the refrigerator using my inverter hooked up to the car battery, with the car running. Inverters are useful things. and a lot cheaper now than they used to be.

Later, we bought a home depot 5kw generator, bare bones (no automatic stuff, no frills of any kind). The idea was to run the furnace, but I was too cheap to hire an electrician. Instead I made a "widowmaker" cord. Don't do that. Can't say I ever had an outage that made me try it with the furnace.

Fast forward 25 years, and now I live in Vermont. It's a big place with lots of power drains, and 10,000 trees between my house and the nearest paved road that are always taking away power. Maybe it's just some bad maintenance or something with Vermont power company, but we lose power a LOT. Sometimes multiple times per day, often multiple days per week. The aren't _usually_ long outages, though I think hurricane Irene a few years ago left us without power for 3 days.

We have oil heat, and well water. Very far from any town. We don't any wood stoves hooked up, though we do have some old ones in the basement.
The normal (less expensvie) thing for woodland dwelling Vermonters to do is have a small generator for things like the fridge, and use wood stoves for heat, either as main heat or as backups in the basement to keep pipes from freezing.

The house I bought (so I can't claim this was any brilliance on my part), came with a commercial Kohler generator (so many KW I'm embarrassed to mention it), in a vented shed to run it (you can't even hear it unless you are close enough and on the correct exterior side of the house), and all the huge switches for automatic power transfer. So normally the house is not without power for more than, literally, one second. If it's 2 or more seconds we'll be surprised. The generator is hooked up to a 500 gallon propane tank (underground, can't even see it). When I first saw the house to consider buying it, I swear I was happier about the generator than any other part of the house.

I noticed someone else has similar setup, big generators, propane tanks, transfer switches. It is a luxurious way to enjoy the worst that mother nature throws at you and maximizes enjoying life in remote places. So instead of worrying about losing power with the blizzard, you can relax and know you're all set. You never want for heat, hot water, or anything else with this setup. You know where you will be when the apocalypse starts, though the propane won't last long :-/ Someday I really need to consider a micro-hydro setup since I have running streams, but it would be fairly expensive to set up and Vermont does not like you messing about in their streams.

 

[arto98607]

My emergency power setup is mainly aimed to keeping two large freezers and two large refrigerators running during outage:

• Primary backup generator is 2.7 kW open frame non-inverter propane powered by 6.5 hp Honda clone. We usually keep around 300 - 400 lbs of propane, most of it in 100 lbs bottles.
• Secondary backup is 2 kW quiet gasoline powered inverter type generator. We keep around 20 gallons of treated gasoline in 5 gal cans.
• Tertiary backup is very loud about 7 kW low speed China Diesel powered generator. We keep few hundred gallons of treated off-road Diesel fuel stored in drums in the barn.

The 2.7 kW was actually 3 - 3.5 kW gasoline generator which I converted to propane for long term fuel storage reasons and also since we are storing propane for other reasons.
We got to test it on propane once this winter during 12 hour outage and it seems to be able to maintain our freezers and fridges running just fine and have some oomph leftover for few LED lights etc. More testing is needed before we know how much more loading it can handle?

Manual transfer switch with 7 "critical breakers" wired but we only need 2 or 3.

I realize freezers and fridges would probably be perfectly OK without power for 12 - 24 hours depending on the season, but the trouble is you will never know in advance how long is the outage?

 

[Industrial Toys]

I really wish people would stop using that TERM, WHOLE HOUSE. It's kind of meaningless for a number of reasons.

One it can mean, that you have a transfer switch for your whole service and a generator that will handle every load in your house and possibly property at the SAME TIME! That would be expensive and possibly cause more problems than it solves. And, do you need to dry clothes and have the hot tub heating during a power outage?

Then it could mean that you have a transfer switch that switches the main service but with a lesser generator, and automatic or manual load managment. That is my preffered choice. In fact, I have a 200 amp automatic ASCO switch, in an electrically heated house, with five buildings and typically use a 7.5 KW generator. In the summer, that's still too big. But every light in every building works, and for me that important. I switch to wood stove in the winter during an outage.