12/25/22 11:23 AM

And all other holiday salutations as appropriate. ;)


How'd you do snow wise Rob? Or outside the band hopefully again on this one..

12/25/22 4:05 PM

Wicked, wicked cold for these parts. Snow was manageable, except for where a lost a shear bolt just as i was starting the snowblower. It's a front mount on a compact tractor so at least i could push much of the snow to one side of the drive. The local farm store was open the morning if the 24th so i was able to clear the drive. Will slowly climb back to above freezing by the end of the week.

When my mother is no longer with us, i see a move back west soon after. Other than being close to family, I can't say I'm enjoying being back in the homeland.

12/26/22 8:44 AM

Hope everyone is having a great Holiday.

I had a 2 1/2 day power outage ending about 4pm Christmas. I was away on a Christmas road trip when it started Friday morning, then came back Saturday when there was no projection of when it would be restored. I have solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall storage battery and Gateway, so I could see exactly what was going on with my phone app.

This was the first test of the storage battery as backup, and it worked great. It kept the house going (essential functions, not everything) the whole time, and got recharged with a bit of solar generation during the day. It doesn’t back up the heat pumps, which are electricity intensive, but does run the oil furnace and I could use the woodstove when I got home. Operation is seamless, I don’t think the dog-sitter even noticed the outage when it occurred.

I think this will handle a very high percentage of outages (it would run out on a long outage with no generation, say if the panels were covered with snow). But even the little generation we get in December was enough to keep it going

I’m pretty happy with how it works. And again, you can see everything, even remotely.

On a cycling note, I got a great set of Silca long handled Allen wrenches, and torx and other bits, from my nephew, all in a wood Breadwinner case!

Again, Happy Holidays!

12/26/22 2:59 PM

I am definitely going Nat gas fired generator to replace my petrol current one... ;)

12/27/22 9:56 AM

Jealous of the off the grid options. In WA my heat was entirely with wood and I loved it. Here I'm on crazy expensive propane but it needs electricity to run the furnace etc and so forth.

12/27/22 10:46 AM

I put a plug on my gas fired furnace with an extension shop chord of proper ga. for fan load and a receptacle instead of the straight hardwire to panel. It just needs about 10 amps for the fan and transformer for the thermostat circuit. Panel breaker is 15a dedicated to furnace.

I unplug it from the wall plug and plug it into the a power strip fed by generator on the occasion.

We did loose power for 5 days during bad ice storm in 2019. I even hot wired my neighbors furnace to our generator when her house hit 40 degrees.

She has her own setup now with a propane generator. We don't loose that long usually ever, but can...

I am sitting here expecting an outage, the winds are gusting 40 mph pops. That usually causes the breaker on the transmission lines to pop the transformer breakers.

If I go stage the generator it won't happen. ;)