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.