Grateful for power outage

We have been without power for 30ish hours now.  Not bad, just enough to be inconvenient.  I'm grateful though, because it pointed out areas I need to be better prepared for.  We have woodstoves, we have headlamps, we have candles, we have food.  The biggest issue that I didn't prepare well enough for is water.  Between 2 people, 3 dogs, 12 cats, and 33 chickens, we need water.  Lots of it.  Snow is everywhere right?  Just melt some.  That takes far longer than I expected it to, and just isn't feasible for large amounts.  I have blue plastic food grade barrels that hold 55 gals each, but they are sitting empty because - life.  I've been busy getting ready for winter, building better animal structures, and on and on, but I simply didn't get to it.  I won't be making that mistake again.  And I'm grateful it was pointed out to me in a fairly pressing, but not at all dangerous, way.

Living with two deep wells, I'm "well" aware of needing stored water for use during power outages (sorry - couldn't resist the pun). I always figured winter would be our "safe" time because the winter creek would be flowing and I've got ways to filter water. However, this winter we've had a lot of freezing weather forcing us to shut down parts of our well based system and as you mentioned, animals that can't go without. However, we had a deep summer drought, followed by a low-rain fall and the winter creek is not running despite us being half way through December. People and animals can get dead much faster from lack of water than lack of food.

That said, I've used 55 gallon drums to store water - getting it in is fairly easy, but getting it out is annoying, so I'd put some thought into that as you get organized. Putting the barrels up on 3-4 pallets so you get a bit of head is a big help. Installing a valve a few inches up from the bottom will make using them easier, but my sister found that her barrel like that would also get too light once it was down to 1/4 full and wind would knock it over, so maybe consider a sheltered location/strapping system in your plans also.

We have a "jiggler" (home-made version here: https://tab-rv.vanillacommunity.com/discussion/8960/how-to-make-a-shaker-siphon-for-adding-fresh-water ) but they can be very hard to start if the barrel is less than 1/2 full.  Thinner tubes are easier to start than fatter tubes, and slightly rigid tubes easier than floppy ones (although I zip-tied a piece of metal tubing to one of ours to help with that.)

Yes - many people underestimate how much energy it takes to melt snow - essentially you are "changing the phase" from solid to liquid and it is that change that eats calories. Also, to remind people of their high-school chemistry class, water is a rare molecule that gets *larger* in the solid phase than the liquid phase. This means that coupled with all the air space that snow represents, a big bucket of snow will yield a quite small bucket of water! I have no doubt that Trace knows this, but for people who aren't used to getting "white rain", I've added this for completeness.

Hopefully, your power is back soon Trace. From your posts, you work hard on your property, so don't sweat the small stuff!

Sorry to hear about your power outage, but glad you have the perspective to see this as an opportunity to learn for the future. I am dealing with a different, but similar situation. There is a major failure in our water delivery system, and I have yet to locate the source of the problem. I suspect it is a leak where our main line feeding water to the house and farm crosses under our creek. As you can imagine, this will make for an interesting, and difficult, repair. Winter doesn’t help. Luckily our system is fed by artesian springs, and I am able to get water at all times from the overflow of our pump house cistern. More importantly, it has pointed out some shortcomings in the infrastructure as it relates to resilience. So much of what we take for granted is fragile, and seemingly designed to fail. Convenience has made us reliant on systems, and the failure of these systems can rapidly lead to disaster. While I am not necessarily advocating for a Luddite rejection of modern ways, a redundant backup of low tech approaches to the necessities of life is cheap insurance. I hope your issues are resolved soon, if not already..

Trace,  Is there some reason why you may not wish to have a gas or other fueled generator on hand?   Like you, we could probably get by quite well melting snow for the human inhabitants on the property.....but the animals need a lot more.  Chickens and geese (and even the dogs) I worry about less with new snow around, but when the power goes out, my wife really wants the well pump to keep working for water and large animal food prep.  The lifesaver here has been the installation of a transfer switch at the power pole and a few generators here and there (stand-alone gas-powered and tractor PTO-driven), each powerful enough to drive the well pump.  While my wife is feeding animals, I'm getting what water we need into pans/kettles/buckets etc.  It's been great for those delays until the grid power gets turned back on.  Hope you are up and running again soon!

Deep well, frost free hand pump:

John Weiland wrote:Trace,  Is there some reason why you may not wish to have a gas or other fueled generator on hand?   Like you, we could probably get by quite well melting snow for the human inhabitants on the property.....but the animals need a lot more.  Chickens and geese (and even the dogs) I worry about less with new snow around, but when the power goes out, my wife really wants the well pump to keep working for water and large animal food prep.  The lifesaver here has been the installation of a transfer switch at the power pole and a few generators here and there (stand-alone gas-powered and tractor PTO-driven), each powerful enough to drive the well pump.  While my wife is feeding animals, I'm getting what water we need into pans/kettles/buckets etc.  It's been great for those delays until the grid power gets turned back on.  Hope you are up and running again soon!

All, thanks for the well wishes.  The power came back on a couple hours ago, so it was a pretty short term outage.

Hey John, I do have two small gas powered generators.  I just don't have a good way to hook them into my house power.  If the outage went on longer, I could have connected to my well pump directly to get water, and connected one to an extension cord on the other side of my house to bring in thru conduit to run my basement freezer.  I'm researching a system that you mentioned, a PTO generator for my tractor.  I don't have the skills to set it up in such a way that I can get it all connected to my panel, so I'll have to do some studying on it and I may just have to have it professionally installed to comply with codes.  

Jay Angler wrote: That said, I've used 55 gallon drums to store water - getting it in is fairly easy, but getting it out is annoying, so I'd put some thought into that as you get organized. Putting the barrels up on 3-4 pallets so you get a bit of head is a big help. Installing a valve a few inches up from the bottom will make using them easier, but my sister found that her barrel like that would also get too light once it was down to 1/4 full and wind would knock it over, so maybe consider a sheltered location/strapping system in your plans also.

We have a "jiggler" (home-made version here: https://tab-rv.vanillacommunity.com/discussion/8960/how-to-make-a-shaker-siphon-for-adding-fresh-water ) but they can be very hard to start if the barrel is less than 1/2 full.  Thinner tubes are easier to start than fatter tubes, and slightly rigid tubes easier than floppy ones (although I zip-tied a piece of metal tubing to one of ours to help with that.)

In our climate, the only place I can really set up the water barrels is in my basement.  Anywhere outside they would be frozen solid here.  I saw a little hand pump that screws into the bung on the top of the barrel and allows you to pump water out, but I'm never used one.  I'll probably try that out first.  Thank you for the link.  Another new thing to explore :)

Ted, I'm glad you have a solution in place.  I agree completely with regards to having low tech redundant solutions in place.  This pointed out a big failure in mine, but it will be rectified shortly.

Trace, that was a great chance to prove how adequate your system will work in the future.

These power outages could also help folks who want to go off-grid.

First, to see if they will have adequate supplies and secondly, to find out how the family will react to periods without electricity.

We spent a month off-grid which was long enough to find out that dear hubby couldn't handle the off-grid situation.

I am glad your electricity is back on and you had a chance to check your system.

Ted Abbey wrote:Deep well, frost free hand pump:

I looked into hand pumps, but I don't believe there is one available for the depth of my well.  The deep well pumps from the Bison site will pump 300 feet, and that is as deep as I've seen for a hand pump.  My well is 485 feet, and I believe that is 20 or so feet below where you hit water.

I will second that tractor driven generators really work well.

The biggest thing is that you are not buying an engine, so you get a lot more power for your money. Mine is 20 KW which is more than enough power for my home.

The other thing is frequency. Smaller home generators that are in the 5000 to 10,000 watt range work, but they do not have enough rotating mass to offset loads, and eventually they will start burning out electric motors and such in the house. But a tractor has so much rotational mass, that as electrical needs fluctuate in the house, the more sensitive tractor governor kicks in, and keeps the frequency (60 cycles per second) constant. This is called "clean power" and is a lot better for delicate circuitry like computers and other electronic equipment. Add in dedicated grounds, and its just better homemade electricity.

They are not perfect. One issue is that in prolonged outages you put extra hours on your tractor. In this case, 30 hours on your tractor. And, during an outage you cannot do other things with your tractor without the house being without power. For me, neither is that horrible. I got a tractor to use it, and powering my home is a worthy thing. And if I need to plow the driveway of snow, just means the house goes dark for an hour.

They are well worth it though. For the money, you get a lot of KW's.

In all cases I have had, the generator just needs to run a couple of hours a day at most if iI schedule my needs.   I have 4 deep cell batteries that are more than adequate to run lights, refrigerator, etc.  I just need the generator when I am running a pump or something else with a heavy draw. Of course, the generator also recharges the batteries.

For the sake of transparency, I also have solar.   But while I was putting in the solar, I did use the generator system several times without issue.  I have kept it in place as a back up system.

Just some additions to the discussion for what it's worth.

We recently transitioned from a fuel-oil furnace to propane.  This is our first winter with the propane and only the furnace is being fueled by that tank.  That said, many larger homesteads in the region have propane back-up generators.  A friend of mine says that his home and his family's farm some miles away both use them and they are set up with an automatic transfer switch:  When they sense that power has been lost to the main grid lines, the gennie fires up and takes up the loads.  As a part of maintenance and monitoring of the system, it's on an internal clock that kicks the generator on each month for a 10 minute run.....somehow also alerts the homeowner if the monthly start-up tests fails for some reason.  Although not yet at that point, I can see where the day will come when my wife and I are not so capable with starting and maintaining gas or PTO generator set-ups and may use our new propane tank as a source for such a back-up.

Trace, I'm just going on memory, but installation of the transfer switch on our power pole involved the joint workmanship of the power cooperative that we buy power from and a local electrician.  It's an extra box that has a special switch....throw the switch to the generator and there's no way of back-feeding power into the grid lines---a  safety feature to keep the coop's linesmen from getting shocked by your backfeed.  I'm thinking it cost about $600.00 total for this, but this likely varies around the country. Most generators over a certain wattage have a 30 amp or higher dedicated plug....and it's both 120V and 240V, so both types of appliances can get power from the generator over this one cable.  The plug on the installed transfer switch must 'match' the plug-type on the generator.  Since we knew we would only need the 30 amps for our size of generator, we had them install the 30 amp plug on the transfer switch.  Cables to connect the generator to the transfer switch are easily found at stores selling generators.

As other have noted, it's helpful to be judicious about needed electrical loads.  At our house panel, I've placed red tape next to breakers that I disconnect when running the generator.  These would be large-load devices that don't need to be turned on during emergencies and would just be placing un-necessary loads on the generator.  So it all works pretty well and we've needed to use the set up surprisingly few times.....hat's off to the responsiveness of our power coop during outages.  At this point, we tend to use the gas generators during winter outages and the tractor generator during non-winter months.  Both generators are around 7000 - 9000 W.  One issue I've noted before with tractor generators is the high rpm that the tractor engine must be run at to get the generator up to proper speed.  Some may be geared differently, but I've been glad that the one tractor, a Yanmar import, has a 3-speed PTO and I can run the engine of that tractor at a lower speed, use the second gear on the PTO, and still get the speed on the generator needed for proper power generation.  Good luck......we're already into a tough winter in the northern US by the looks of things!

One thing to keep in mind about propane generators is that they are not very efficient. For a whole house generator, they consume several gallons an hour which does not seem like much, but they will suck a huge tank dry if the power goes out for a day or two. That assumes the tank is full. If you are using the tank for other means, like heating or cooking, that means at any given time it might be less than full. So that means they will just be sucked dry even faster.

Here is the real problem with that: everyone has propane back up generators. Everyone runs out of propane at the same time, causing the propane companies to get an influx of calls for a host of people without electricity, so you just might be out of luck in getting a fill-up for a prolonged outage.

You won't have this problem with natural gas plumbed in from a supplier though.

As for back feeding the grid, that is a real issue.

Its all about electrical conversion and the fact that electricity can go backwards or forward on any line. At the powerhouse where I work, we go from 125 volts DC on the exciter, to 600 volts AC, to 4160volts, to 34,500 volts in about 100 feet. It can do that by using transformers to step up the power in terms of voltage.

Your generator does the same thing if it is allowed to back feed the grid. It may only put out 220 volts, but when it hits that transformer on the electric pole, it goes to 7000 volts. That can kill linemen.

Sort of...

We are required to ground out the lines we are working on now, wear rubber gloves and hard hats rated for 20,000 volts, and use insulated tools for that very reason, but it still should not be done. All a person needs to do is snap the main breaker to their house, and the power made by any generator hooked to your home, cannot go out on the grid. This is what I do. There is no need to purchase a huge expensive switch that costs hundreds of dollars. The law states that a homeowner cannot back fed the grid with a generator, but does not say how to accomplish that, just that they cannot do it. I just snap my main breaker off...

If you don't trust yourself to do that, today they have a tiny metal lockout device that rivets to your breaker box. When you snap on the breaker to the generator, it pushes up and blocks the main breaker to your house. It's cheap and simple. To get the generator breaker on, the main breaker has to be off. Its quick and simple, requires no electrician, and costs $20. PERFECT!