At 09:51 AM 11/28/04 -0800, Carl Dershem wrote:Where are you at? Even on the farm when I was a kid (and used electricity only a few hours a day, except for the well head), we never lost power that often.
Central Vermont. We have a town power company that does a pretty good job, and it buys power from several sources. But it doesn't take too much to down lines or blow those big pole breakers, particularly in winter. Our outages last winter were from a cars taking down poles, ice breaking branches and downing lines, an exploded transformer (that was a sight!), on-pole breakers opening and needing replacement (that happened twice). There were a few scheduled maintenance outages, plus we have small glitches and dropouts pretty regularly during the summer (electrical storms anywhere in the area can glitch us) and spring ice melt. The calmest time is the fall.
I can confirm similar events in S.W. Virginia. We have a serious ice storm every year or two, that takes down branches and any trees that have gotten weak since the last time, and takes down any nearby power lines with them. We have hurricanes (although never as fiercely as the folks on the coastline) that do the same. Our neighborhood has underground power cables, but we're still at the mercy of the larger local power grid. And of course there are the squirels who self-immolate in the transformers. (I can't recall a case of a driver taking out a pole; around here they seem to be marginally smarter than the squirels!) And the electrical storms in spring and summer can be fierce. The automatic breakers often fix the problem within minutes, and our power company is pretty good about getting crews out quickly and fixing things reasonably soon, but storm-caused outages can cover large areas of geography, not all of it reasonably accessible here in the mountains. (For those in the West, translate "mountains" as "hills."
Sounds like your farm was in a rather protected part of the country! And is\t sounds as if I should look seriously into getting a UPS for the computer, besides the protected power strips I currently use. Where is this $30 model, and does it really do the job?
John
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