the power outage

 I woke on March 23, 2022 to the sound of my water distiller turning off, about 5:31am (it has a loud fan that takes a while to wind down).  After a second I realized that the power had probably gone out and it had.  It stayed off until about 7:55am.  Since then we've had a couple of blips but otherwise OK.

The outages were undoubtedly due to the weather, temp was about 33 but it must have been a little colder as there was ice on the trees and when that happens branches and trees fall messing up the power.

The only benefit of our RF noisy power meters

noisy power meter in a different season

  (see the Youtube videos:  http://wb9kzy.com/power.htm ) is that they "talk" to the co-op and when they stop "talking" the co-op knows that there's trouble and roughly where it is.

To the north I could see that the lights were on so the power line fault must have been on the phase that serves this side of the road.  And about 6:47a I heard a few "dings" on the landline indicating that one or both of the other phases had also been faulted.

I rounded up my flashlight (a nice Maglight 2AA LED) and my headlight (a no-name 3AAA LED from Electronic Goldmine) and was able to at least do some reading.

Now I'll have to start charging stuff up, the AA cells in the flashlight and the AAA cells in the headlight along with the lead-acid batteries I have to power the radios.

And whenever this happens I always think about solar power / batteries / wind power / generator but nothing ever happens :)

Hopefully a different topic tomorrow !

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm