This morning, when we woke up, the power was out. Again. There was a bit of a storm last night, something went wrong somewhere, the lights were out.

My wife just hooked up the generator, I hauled out the butane stove, we cooked, ate, got the kid off to school, and I came home to work from home. OK, so our home is well prepared for blackouts, but the blackouts are coming closer together, they are lasting longer (the one after Hurricane Irene was 10 days for many people around here, it was just 5 days for us). Then after the Halloween freak storm power was out for 3 days. Each month, we have an outage of several hours or days,

Anyone else noticing a less reliable grid?

Things stay relatively calm here in central Ohio. We rarely have outages and when we do, they generally only last for a few moments to maybe a minute, with no increase in duration nor frequency.

We were out several days when the remnants of hurricane Rita passed through here several years ago, but that's not common.

As this is a relatively safe area of the country, you are all welcome to move here. I'd enjoy having some people around me who appreciate the need to prepare.

Of course, now that I said we are relatively safe, this will probably be the spot where the next asteriod decides to impact.......

-- b

I remember it was about three years ago, right after we moved the power was out in our old neighborhood for 9 days.
We had a major ice storm a few years before which resulted in power out in most of the city for a couple days so the power company came out and butchered the trees that they ran their wires through the middle of then a few years later the trees that recovered got their revenge and power was out twice as long. The tree was right next to my house next to a big empty field and they just couldn't the electric lines through the middle of the open field, they had to put them right through the middle of the trees. It was probably 5 degrees hotter in my house in the summer with half the shade gone after the "trimmed".
My new neighborhood the lines are underground but we've still had a couple short outages within the three years I've been here.
This is Central Ohio too. Old house was in the middle east of Columbus, new house just north of the outerbelt.

At my house in NJ, power has been extremely reliable. For the past couple years they've been doing a lot of work on the poles, including adding a bunch of solar panels everywhere. I was really surprised that our power didn't go out for more than a minute or two during that freak snowstorm we had that took down trees all over.

With my apartment out in PA, the power has always been terrible. It goes out at least three times a year, and every time it goes out it's out at least all day. What makes that more annoying though, is that everything in the apartment is electric. Thankfully, I'm prepared for it, so it isn't anything more than an inconvenience, but it's still annoying.

We struggle with similar issues, but not as bad as yours. Last year out for 9 days at one time, 3 days for another.

I'm kind of nervous today because it's snowing heavy and we are overdue.

We had more outages in 2011 than in the previous ten. I ended up buying a generator...and the outages stopped. The generator has been through the mandated break-in and long-term-storage procedures. Also, I put together a one-page cheatsheet for generator operations, laminated it and made a little package out of everything needed in the garage in case my wife needs to get it going in my absence.

Isn't that usually the way it seem to work out.

But I'm sure (unfortunately), it will come in handy in the future. In the meantime, I've just decided to think of these things as self-insurance
-- b

Our grid is robust and reliable - this will probably continue until either our next significant earthquake or a really big Santa Ana windstorm. Some areas of SoCal did have outages after a recent Santa Ana windstorm.

Oh, yes they did indeed. Some for several days or even a week in duration.

HJ

We've had only two significant power outages in the past twenty years, that I can recall: 1994 (ice storm, temps in the teens - rolling blackouts to ease the load on the grid) and 2008 (equipment malfunction - 102 degrees - how did people live here before a/c?)

Our lines are underground, which avoids a lot of problems.

Now what I find funny, since I dumped roadrunner for wide open west for internet my power has been out more then my internet. I'll report my power out via the power companies web site.

We began experiencing frequent power outages when we moved from Virgina to here in Maryland. During the 20 years we spent in our Virgina home, we lost power about 3 times, all during Hurricanes.

Here in Maryland, over the past 11 years, we lose power about 4-5 times a year, sometime for just a few moments, but also as long a 7 days, with several 1-3 day outages.

We know the problem, but can't get the power company to do anything about it. Our development is about 65 homes, and within the development, utilities are underground, but the feeder line from the substation (about 1 mile away)travels over poles that go through a heavily wooded area for about 1/2 of that distance. The trees are overgrown and the power company never goes into the woods to trim the trees. Thus, there are a lot of falling branches shorting and/or breaking the feed lines for our small community.

Like most power companies, ours gives priority restoration to the most users first. 65 users are on the low end for restoration, thus we wait a long time in any widespread outage.

As near as I can guess, it seems that the costs of trimming are more than the costs of restoration, so the trees continue to grow into, through and over the wires.

So, I don't know if this should be called a technical "grid" problem or "saving" money through "deferred maintenance." Maybe there is no difference.

Ultimately, we ended up with an automatic standby generator.

It might be worthwhile to see if you can find out if there are trees around the power lines feeding your home that are causing the frequent outages. You never know, you might have some luck in getting the power company in to trim the problem trees.

Where we live in Maryland (Frederick City) we rarely loose power for more than a few minutes (now I have jinxed it). We had one outage a few years ago that lasted several hours, mainly an inconvenience. While the downtown has buried lines, our neighborhood still has above ground lines.

Pete

I haven't noticed it where I am, but I worry a bit how things shake out in the coming years.

A combination of aging infrastructure, bad economic times that squeezes maintenance/replacement cycles, copper thieves, entering a higher sunspot activity phase, and apparently more frequent extreme weather events (Seems like more and more once-in-a-century type events occuring) makes me wonder if power will be a bit less reliable for a while.

These copper thieves really make me mad. And they must be mad to pull off some of the heists that they do, like stealing "hot" wires to street lamps or even to public transit (thieves pulled hot wires from the BART commuter train system in the San Francisco Bay Area over the holidays while I was visiting there). I'm surprised we don't find more people electrocuted.

We've been in our current house for about 2.5 years, and the neighborhood is about 9 years old. According to our neighbors things have been fairly rock-solid after some initial hiccups. Until about a year ago. We had a couple outages in the early summer that went for an hour and change each, and then two days after Irene. Nothing awful, but enough to get one to thinking.

We have a standby generator now. I don't know if the past year was a fluke or a warning, but we will have a dry basement and safe food at least until the gas service gives out...

Heck, we lose power every night. We're building an off-grid house (not a greenie; the power companys don't service our area) and we've been powered by a Champion 4500/3500W gennie 16 to 17 hours a day since Nov. 22. We ordered our solar batteries in October and are still waiting for them.

The Champion was our emergency back-up when we lived in California. Never used it for an emergency.

How has your Champion generator held up? I bought one recently and it's the first generator I've owned.

Not a hickup. It burns about 5 gal a day (16 hours) and seems to burn about 2oz of oil a day. It runs everthing in the house (if we're carefull not to run heavy items at the same time). I drag it to the well pump about every six days to top off the 1200 gal water tank (it's 1500 gal, but we don't fill it to the top). I usually change the oil then, also. I have a "constant-use" spark plug for it but have not installed it yet (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

Nice. Thanks for the report.

I know how it is to be very low on the electric company's priority list. where I live we had an ice storm a couple of years ago and the large sub-division just down the road had power after two days. We were out for eight days. I am actually glad it happened though because that's why I first got into prepping. It's surprising how much you can learn in eight days!

If you want to know what "unreliable" looks like try living in Zimbabwe. 12hr + power outs every day are a given.

I just sent my " Mother in Law" two AA powered L.E.D. Lanterns, a universal speed charger and a lot of rechargeable batteries. She tells me that is going to make a slightly massive difference to her quality of life.

Who needs light's,when you got Delicious Biltong to nosh on