how many power outages do you have?

how many power outages do you have a month?

  • 1 or 2

    Votes: 6 18.8%
  • 3 to 5

    Votes: 2 6.3%
  • 6 to 10

    Votes: 1 3.1%
  • more

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • never

    Votes: 23 71.9%

  • Total voters
    32
  • Poll closed .

Frank Fusco

Member
Messages
12,782
Location
Mountain Home, Arkansas
I live in a semi-rural area. We have two electric companies. One mostly serves the nearby city, the other is a co-op serving rural areas. I'm on the co-op. We experience power outages, sometimes frequently. I'm curious, for those of you living in rural areas, how many power outages, even brief ones, do you have a month? Don't count during severe weather. I'm after the no-good-reason failures. I'll start.
 
I'm 'out in the country,' several miles from the nearest town. One of the first things I did when I bought this property was buy an 8500 Watt generator. In nearly three years now, I have NEVER used it.

By contrast, my sister lives right in the middle of town - the one that's four or five miles away - and she had two outages just last week. Both outages lasted several hours, but last winter she had one that lasted three days. Mine never even blinked... Go figure...
 
I voted never also, since all the other choices were too frequent.

We have the occasional bump/brown/lights-brightening-momentarily event, but those are usually storm/wind related. (I'd say that wind causes more outages than rain or lightning or ice/snow)

We also, maybe once a year, have a unexplained outage which I -sometimes- later find is the result of a car accident (someone striking a pole).

But I can't remember when we've had one that was longer than an hour.
 
:rofl: :rofl:

Not one hour after my last post and we've now had TWO blinks here at work courtesy of a summer thunderstorm. But I've got a UPS on my computer so I don't care. Still, a good excuse to stop work and go stare at the rain for a while -- which we so desperately need -- and chat with my coworkers.
 
Hi Frank.

We are on a two county coop. When we moved here in 12/02, we were having 5 or 6 outages per week. Most were in the order of a few minutes with the occasional 30 minuter thrown in.

In 2003 the coop installed a new 20 megawatt substation about 3 miles from us. The also ran new 7200V lines with new poles. Things improved to maybe 2 to 5 outages per year.

Last summer, the coop installed new dual voltage pole transformers up and down our road. When that was completed, they switched us, and everyone else, from 7200V to 14400V coming up to our pole pig.

We are outside the city of McKinney, but there are new housing developments going up everywhere around us. I call them the slums of 2030! The coop has to supply the power for these new projects, so they doubled the voltage on the distribution lines.
 
Hi there Frank,
I'm a country boy too. About every three months we will lose power for a few hours and the day will be as pretty as you could want. No reason what so ever for it other than antique systems they refuse to replace. It’s strange too because they were rated one of the three most expensive utilities companies in the United States the hurricane season before last.
It was during that season, when we had three known hurricanes and two tropical storms out there working their way toward us that I bit the bullet and had a 16,000 watt LP Guardian installed. Now when the power goes out it takes 60 seconds before the Guardian takes over the whole house.
I thought it was extremely expensive when I looked at the unit. What I didn't know was it cost as much to hook it up as it did to buy it.

The bad thing is, it's not hooked to the shop. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

DT
 
I live in the suburbs of Buffalo, and we loose power maybe once every 3 or 4 months. Usually it is due to a storm. We were smacked pretty hard last October, when a suprise heavy snow/ice storm hit the area. I have a couple of low wattage Honda camping generators on semi-permenant loan (I'm storing them for a relative) that I can run my sump pump and fridge & freezer if necessary.

I think I'm getting the same rain that Art is getting in London, ON as we are not all that far apart.
 
I decided I couldn't hit the never button, but it's usually 5 or 6 per year. Normally out for 1 to 6 hours at a time, and rain related. Lucky we haven't had any problems with the storms the last 4 to 6 weeks. I have battery back up UPS units on both computers, and surge protectors on all major electronics. Wish I could afford a generator, but it's just not in the cards right now. Jim.
 
Like Jim, I couldn't hit never, but we can go months at a time with no outages, then have a couple in a month. Tropical conditions can really whip up power lines.
 
We're on city power (LA Dept of Water and Power), and we seldom have full outages. We do have a lot of power dips, but I think those are related to overtaxed wiring in our house, not the power supplier. According to the battery backup software on my computer, my system switches to the battery 5 to 10 times daily, but these voltage aberrations are not enough to reset the clocks and VCRs in the house. I have the sensitivity on the backup battery set pretty high, so it kicks in at the first sign of a non-optimum voltage.

Frank, if you want, I can edit the poll to add a few (less frequent) choices.

[Edited to add]
Now that I'm home, I just checked my UPS logs and I was wrong about the number of events it records. In the last month I've only had 13, with the system on battery a total of 1 minute and 5 seconds. The previous 5 to 10 times daily was what I was seeing when we first moved into the house, so apparently something has changed for the better in the last three years. Also, the log is showing all 13 of the events were blackouts, with zero undervoltage or overvoltage events.
 
We have a major power company, but are on a narrow leg that butts into an another companies territory. We are litterally fed from the second to last pole on our road before the other company's territory starts. This is the log from my UPS since May 1, which is pretty typical.

Sun Jun 03 14:29:34 EDT 2007 Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Sun Jun 03 14:29:34 EDT 2007 Power failure.
Sun May 13 21:34:58 EDT 2007 Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Sun May 13 21:34:55 EDT 2007 Power failure.
Tue May 01 22:51:18 EDT 2007 Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Tue May 01 22:51:13 EDT 2007 Power failure.
Tue May 01 22:49:51 EDT 2007 Power is back. UPS running on mains.
Tue May 01 22:49:49 EDT 2007 Power failure.

We maybe have a couple significant outages from storms each year and last year they shut us off twice during the hottest week of the year for a couple hours each.
 
I also voted never, but it's really 2-4 per year. If it lasts more than 30 minutes, it may very well be hours. We too are on a co-op. A couple of years ago my house was the only one in the area without power. A call to the power co. resulted in a truck being dispatched to determine the problem. This was about 11:30 PM. The problem was located at a transformer behind the house. Another truck showed up and other "unspecified problems" were located. About 2:00 AM they pulled out. No problems since then.:)
 
I voted 1-2 a month... and during the summer that is true, mostly due to bad drivers. Thankfully we're on the 'next town' over's grid vs downtown Bridgeport. They lose power much more frequently than we do.

to those of you living on the end of the power grid. I envy you, that sounds like my kind of place.
 
I can't vote.

We may have a power outage once every couple years.

If so I am ready with a 15KW generator.

It is meant for my work, but since I am on a different grid than my business, the generator goes back and forth, when needed

Actually, it is too small for my business. I have thought about upgrading.
 
Not Rural....... :D

I've been here 17 years, we have had one local power outage. They were doing some work nearby, the cables are all underground, they had to lift these covers to get at the cables. The underground place the cables are in, is a kind of square ditch, about 3 feet square, the lids are 3 feet across by about a foot wide and 4" thick, steel reinforced lids. The workmen dropped one....... :eek: the edge of the lid sliced though the main power line, and the phone lines.......

We were out of power for about 5 hours, what a mess, no electricity, no auto opening doors, no AC, no cash register, no lights, no freezers working, lots of ice cream melting..... yeah, it was a fun night :doh: :D
 
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