What do you all do to be prepared for long term power loss?

[oosik]

Our electric utility here is a co-op. We Do get outages - now and then. Usually less than four hours.

Anyhow - if it's going to be longer than an hour. I will get an email from the co-op. Estimate until utility is back in service - general area w/out power - what caused the problem. I have APC battery backup for the computer and printer. They send this same info to all cell phones.

I've been 43 years out here in the sticks and sagebrush and the longest outage - 28 hours.

My first chore during an outage. Fire up my Coleman camp stove - make a good 'ol pot of cowboy coffee. Get Brownie covered with his blanket. Snuggle into my Lazy Boy and pull a big afgan over me. Get my first cup drunk before I fall asleep.

 

[paulsharvey]

So, for people who had First Hand experience with the West NC/E Tenn/NW SC outages this past year; i know everything was initially off line, and many individuals were out for 14+ days. My question is, how long was it before the towns, and maybe 30% of stuff was back online, and it was just the far flung isolated customers out?

That does affect planning. If You are out for 28 days, but after 7, you can start getting gas/food/propane/water, then you aren't really "Out" for 28 days

Blizzard of 93, I was just a kid, but we were snowed in for like 8 days or so; and power was out for like 14 or so (not too far from Clarksburg WVa), but after that first 8 days or so, you could get to a store. The store might not be fully stocked, but it had some stuff.

 

[TN8Man]

What do you mean, exactly?

I design equipment for the EMC industry, and hardening consumer, industrial, and military electronics against EMP pulses, either natural or weaponized, is very big business.

I remember doing rad hard and emi/emc testing on satellite components back in the day but with newer weapon systems like directed energy weapons (DEW) hasn't the game changed?

 

[WinterDeere]

I remember doing rad hard and emi/emc testing on satellite components back in the day but with newer weapon systems like directed energy weapons (DEW) hasn't the game changed?

Yes, if only in scale. Starting ca.2007/08, we started building more and more very high CW power systems for testing aircraft, tanks, bombs, missiles, etc.

Because the high-power EMC industry had grown up mostly around automotive electronics and avionics, the companies building systems for automotive and avionics EMC testing are at the forefront of providing these large-scale systems. Test sites are Army (White Sands Missile Range, Redstone Arsenal), Navy (Dahlgren Naval Surface Warefare Center), University of Calif. (Sandia National Labs), and several big sites in UK, mainland Europe, and Turkey.

The Army's WSMR site being the real mother ship, it is absolutely enormous with the energy draw of a city, although Qinetiq at the UK's Boscombe Downs base is also big enough to radiate entire arrays of tanks or planes in formation... that is where one of our customers was accidentally killed by HERF on the test range, I had mentioned that story once before.

Power levels for automotive and aeronautics testing used to run perhaps as high as 10 kW at low frequencies (kHz / MHz), to only 50 or 100 watts at C-band/S-band frequencies (low GHz). But once the Army and Navy got involved, we were suddenly building systems of many tens of kilowatts, now up to 100 kW, in upper MHz into GHz frequencies. Single amplifiers used in these applications can sometimes be large enough to fill several semi trucks, when broken down for transport. Some can draw as much as a megawatt of power, between transistor bias, cooling, and control systems.

It's always interesting to see power plant-scaled cooling systems, and mains power systems that look like they're scaled for a skyscraper building, piggy-backed onto many thousands of the smallest and most delicate microscopic microwave transistor circuits you have ever seen. It's a true juxtaposition of opposing worlds, like using semi-trucks to nudge individual bacteria around on a petri dish.

 

[TN8Man]

Yes, if only in scale. Starting ca.2007/08, we started building more and more very high CW power systems for testing aircraft, tanks, bombs, missiles, etc.

Because the high-power EMC industry had grown up mostly around automotive electronics and avionics, the companies building systems for automotive and avionics EMC testing are at the forefront of providing these large-scale systems. Test sites are Army (White Sands Missile Range, Redstone Arsenal), Navy (Dahlgren Naval Surface Warefare Center), University of Calif. (Sandia National Labs), and several big sites in UK, mainland Europe, and Turkey.

The Army's WSMR site being the real mother ship, it is absolutely enormous with the energy draw of a city, although Qinetiq at the UK's Boscombe Downs base is also big enough to radiate entire arrays of tanks or planes in formation... that is where one of our customers was accidentally killed by HERF on the test range, I had mentioned that story once before.

Power levels for automotive and aeronautics testing used to run perhaps as high as 10 kW at low frequencies (kHz / MHz), to only 50 or 100 watts at C-band/S-band frequencies (low GHz). But once the Army and Navy got involved, we were suddenly building systems of many tens of kilowatts, now up to 100 kW, in upper MHz into GHz frequencies. Single amplifiers used in these applications can sometimes be large enough to fill several semi trucks, when broken down for transport. Some can draw as much as a megawatt of power, between transistor bias, cooling, and control systems.

It's always interesting to see power plant-scaled cooling systems, and mains power systems that look like they're scaled for a skyscraper building, piggy-backed onto many thousands of the smallest and most delicate microscopic microwave transistor circuits you have ever seen. It's a true juxtaposition of opposing worlds, like using semi-trucks to nudge individual bacteria around on a petri dish.

White Sands was my beach hangout without the water. I spent a few years at Holloman AFB, in a prior life.

We had to get total dose and latch-up testing done.