Dodged that problem
BobJudy
Member Posts: 6,630 ✭✭✭✭
Storms rolled through the southern half of Michigan's lower peninsula late this afternoon and between the the 2 major power companies, 380,000 places are without power. I was at the stove making us dinner and the power flickered on and off a couple of times but so far so good. Because Judy and I are on the extreme edge of Detroit Edisons service, it is a running joke that if someone is going to have an outage, it'll be us. It is really frustrating, but that's just one of those things you put up with to live in a rural area.
About 3 weeks ago a blow went through and killed the power and also knocked the top 25 feet or so of a white pine into the pond. It hit tip down and is actually driven into the bottom. It's in a place where I can't pull it out in one piece without doing major damage, so I'll have to get out a chainsaw and cut up as much as I can and haul it out a piece at a time. Today's blow knocked down more that I guess had been damaged when the first one busted through the other trees as it came down. Now I have a genuine brush pile because it fell on the first one but it is 30 ft from shore. I might wait for the pond to freeze over this winter before I do any cutting and then skid as much as I can across the ice. Country living is an adventure for sure.
I hope the rest of our Michigan members came through this latest blow o.k. Bob
Comments
We will most likely be moving North... by this coming summer. Looked at places in Ky, Indiana, Lower Michigan... One thing for sure the new home will have a basement...
I live across the pond from you and they finally buried my service.
Our power was out for about 8 hours last Wednesday. Luckily, we'd gone fishing so we really didn't notice! We have a 16K generator that automatically came on so no worries about the fridges and freezers.
There was a lightning strike somewhere close and it caused a fault in the power line running through one of our pastures. The guys finally located it, brought in a backhoe, and got it fixed. They have some type of widget that they use that is able to locate the break in a buried line.
I think your plan of waiting for the pond to freeze is a good one. How big is the pond? Are there fish in it? If they are the top of the tree that's stuck in there might provide some great habitat/cover for them if it can be left.
The pond is a couple of acres and yeah I had thought about the benefits of leaving some in for fish structure. 30 years ago, the business I was managing had a power failure caused by a break in the lines that were buried under the parking lot. To find the location they used a gadget they called thumper. Basically a generator hooked to a BIG capacitor. They isolated the buried lines and then sent jolts from the capacitor through and that let them detect where the fault was. Makes one appreciate the power of ekectricity. Bob
Yep Bob is correct about underground cable fault locators called thumpers these days, back 45 years ago we used scopes that cost thousands of dollars, today anybody can get a handheld thumper for less than 50 bucks... times change...
18 hours and counting crap
If your already counting crap at 18 hours.....what will you be counting at 24hrs!
other peoples crap..........
As of a couple of minutes ago there are still 371,000 outages. On their outage map most of the locations don't even have an estimate for restoration. I wonder if any of those folks have an electric vehicle and what they are doing about charging it? I remember seeing an ad for I think the Ford truck ev that showed them plugging it in to run the house during a power failure. Of course they don't tell you how long that'll last and what happens then when you don't have power or a charged usable vehicle. Guess you just sit home in the dark watching your food spoil. Bob
I love my whole house generator running off of FREE well gas. I never know the power was out unless the clock on the microwave is blank. There is 10 second delay from power out to genset kicking in. That few seconds wipes the clock out on the micro.