So far our situation has been easy on this question as the temps never went above 30 and after the storm passed the temps plunged down even further. Holding at 4 degrees right now day four without power. In fact we have had the opposite problem in that a lot of the fridge stuff that we didn't eat up already - like the lettuce - has frozen solid & will have to be tossed. Of course the the meat is so expensive that I'm glad that has been our problem.

What was your experience with water pressure from the tap? Most communities use electric pumps to store water in towers. Was there a decrease in pressure?

Ya gotta love 'em. Who helps these people dress in the morning???

Thanks for this thread. Being in South Lousy-anna, heating has not been a priority in my list of concerns. If an ice storm comes, we will surely lose power and that means a loss of heat. I am going to remedy that situation immediately. The climate is definitely changing according to the view that I have from these shoes.

Wow, thanks for all the input. In response to a few questions...

Artificial Light Needs: I'm not a morning person, so I'd say we used lights from maybe 5 or 5:30 pm to about 1 am. That's about 8 hours per day. After tripping on something the first night, I also left one tube of the flourescent light on in the corner throughout the night so I wouldn't have to fumble for a flashlight if I woke up in the dark and decided to use the bathroom.

Lesson Learned #12 Keep things clean, especially the floor
It's not like I was that busy, but I let things accumulate and had a big clean-up once power came back. Extra blankets, clothes, used batteries are all trip hazzards, too, and I had no excuse but laziness.

Specific Flashlights: One is an old Inova, no longer available (not sure which model), but I'm sure they have similar models now. The other was a limited production run that a guy on the candle power forums had made. I picked up two and think they're great, but don't know the manufacturer - or even if one was ever identified. They're not as fancy or tough as the stuff from HDS, for example, (which also have variable output) but I love the fact that I have a nice bright 42 lumen flashlight (lasts only 1-2 hours at that output, if I recall correctly) AND a lower output light, suitable for other uses such as use indoors, reading (with much longer battery life at lower output) - all in one light. I can't recall specifics, but I think there are about 20 steps, each cutting the output by 20% or something, so 42 lumens, 34, 27, 22, 18, 15, 12, 9, 7, 5, etc. There are many situations in which just a small amount of light is just fine.

I can be a bit of a gear geek at times - although I always try to focus on features I'll actually use. I read a bit on the Candle Power Forums and flashlightreviews.com before selecting this light. (Sadly, not before selecting that headlamp I complained about previously.)

I've been looking into Petzl and Fenix, but had felt like I'd spent enough on gear for a while. I'll look again and maybe pick one up.

Lesson Learned #13 A GPS device can help in (mildly) surprising ways
At least it was surprising to me. After abandoning my car due to virtually no gas and getting a ride home on the first day of power outage, the traffic in Bellevue was a mess. We tried to be clever and take a street called West Lake Sammamish down to I 90. This is a lakeside street with virtually no stop signs or lights, and thus less likely to be impacted by the power outage than the other major streets we'd driven through early with no-traffic-light=four-way-stop every block. Essentially, this would have worked fairly well, except for the fact that, well, we'd just had a wind storm so trees were down across the road every half mile.

Now, directions from the GPS weren't helpful because it just kept trying to route us back to the main roads we wanted to avoid. And we didn't really want to explore - many of the side streets there are isolated neighborhoods that just feed out onto that road, and those that have exits are a suburban maze. But I was able to use the GPS with it's handy zoom and drag features to browse the surrounding area and identify a way to turn off of - and come back to - the street we wanted to take. After 3 detours for downed trees we were about ready to give up, but had made a lot of progress. We stuck with it and made it through. I'm sure we saved at least 30 minutes (and more importantly, perhaps, saved that gas) by avoiding the main roads.

Fridge: I didn't worry about it much in the first 24 hours. I didn't check the temp, but I doubt our fridge had gotten too warm in 6 hours - it's new, and I keep it at 33-35. I know lots of people who seem to keep theirs at 40, but I like cold drinks!

Later, since I'd been paying a lot of attention to temperatures, it was 38-42 outdoors for the most part, which was better than indoors that day, so I moved some things out. After 48 hours, it was 41 inside, and maybe a few degrees cooler outside, so I went back to not worrying much about it.

It was also clear at this point that Seattle had power and the east side was slowly regaining it, so I wasn't going to go hungry. I would have worried more about the freezer, but we had almost nothing in it. Eventually I'll get a chest freezer and stock it, but I don't know how long one would stay cold without power. You'd think it wouldn't be too expensive to for the makers to insulate one of those as good as a cooler.

Water Pressure Excellent point! I'd completely forgotten. We normally have fairly high water pressure here. For the first 48 hours or so I didn't notice any change, then we started to see it decrease, and it was much lower by day 5. I assume that electric pumps are somewhere "up stream" and that they weren't working. Had there been some sort of real disaster or prolonged outage, I suppose we might have ended up without water.

Scanners - thanks for the info.

Benjammin - thanks for the many interesting points

[color:"blue"]WallyWorld[/color] - is this a real place? Perhaps an abbreviation - er, lengthening - of Wal-Mart that I haven't heard before?

Lesson #14 Bad Luck and [color:"red"] Evil Social Engineering[/color]
I know of one person who was without power much longer than we were. Their neighborhood was restored, but there was an additional tree down that prevented the newly restored power from reaching 3 homes. When 70,000-ish people are still without power after a week, the power company has got to prioritize and issues affecting a handful of people are going to be lower on the list. This could have been any one of us.

During the conversation in which I heard this story, I also heard another story. I was shocked to later hear someone else say they'd done the same thing. I want to be very clear that I do not support this, nor advocate it - but I think it's worth reporting what some people are doing.

What these people had done was falsely report live downed power lines in their neighborhood. They were tired of not having power, and tired of the automated phone system the power company had put in place to prevent having to try to deal in-person with thousands of phone calls. Once these people found a back door to get to a real person at the power company, or once the volume of calls was reduced to the point the power company could start handling them again, these people called in, identified where the tree had taken out their line, and claimed the line was live. One of them said, "Well, I said it MIGHT be live."

Live power lines are obviously very dangerous - at least one person was killed stepping on one covered by storm debris in the aftermath of this storm - and I have no problem with someone legitimately reporting a line they believe to be live. But these people were essentially lying in order to get their area bumped up on the "fix list." The power company needs accurate information to prioritize their work correctly. What if another area with a REAL live downed line had to wait longer because of this? I found it troubling that some people valued their convenience so highly, and other people so little.

Thanks,

While I respect your view on Generator sizes,
most smaller units (Honda's excepted) don't last long.
Change the oil on a regular basis and especially after the first 3 to 5 hours of use.
Use Stabil or equivalent fuel stabilizer.
Lacquer is no fun to keen out of a carburetor etc.
Also fuel consumption is less true than claimed by advertising.
The fuel math is a little jaded too.
You will burn the fuel equal to your power setting (load).
What you seem to be saying is that the minimum fuel use (or flow rate floor) is higher in larger generators, but that's not really true.
More or less you will consume fuel based on the power consumption. The difference in fuel efficiently isn't like an automobile where the large car weights more than the compact.
Also remember that the performance ratings are not really continuous duty unless the generator is name plated as such.
It's nice to have some head room in capacity, you never know what you are going to run into or need.
Fuel can still be saved if necessary by just running the generator on & off time as a 1 hour on 1 hour off for most things (like fridges, microwaves etc).
The bigger generators also typically regulate better and have more stability and reduced electrical noise (but not always acoustical noise of course) You can build/buy an enclosure to reduce acoustical noise.
One final thought, mark your calendar or set an appointment, but run the generator once a month for at least a little while.
We have a number of gen-set both personally and at work.
Many has been the time when someone tried to fire up a generator for an emergency (unexpected need) and couldn't.
Good luck.

Again borrowing on experience from more hurricane power outages than we care to remember, when you have the various flashlights / lanterns etc. in use around the house, it is beneficial to place (common sense safety permitting) mirrors behind and or above illumination sources. It makes a dramatic difference, particularily when the room has darker decorating colors. Even tacking a white bedsheet against a dark wall behind a flashlight will increase the reflected light, although a mirror is much better. When using any mirrors or light backdrops, remember just how hot the source of illumination can be interms of possible fires / melting and/or heat stress fatigue on glass mirrors.

Regards,
Comanche7

Here in the D/FW area, we've seen a LOT of stores carrying inexpensive, chinese import generators. We're talking sub $300, sometimes sub $200. We were discussing this in the local ham club meeting, when one of our members said that those generators were generally aimed at contractors and had an engine lifetime of 400 hours.

The general idea is that contractor generators get stolen on a regular basis, so no point in buying an expensive one. They are cheap enough to get charged onto a single job, and if they outlast the project, they can be given away to an employee.

The club member's understanding was that the engine would not generally be rebuildable, as it'd be a really low cost design for which parts would not be available. I can't speak from personal experience on this subject.

Recently I've been involved in moving a radio repeater from one water tower to another, and I got told that city water isn't supplied by pumps, at least not directly. Rather, your water pressure is supplied by the mass of water stored in the area water towers. Water is pumped up the water tower, but your faucet pressure is passive. I would imagine in a power outage situation that the water in the towers would continue to supply passive pressure until the level in the towers got low.

It might only be good for 400 hours then it's scrap metal, but that's still 20+ days (assuming 8 hours of sleep when it is off) of enough power to keep the basics running. If you need a supplimental gennie, or one that you can keep out in front as a decoy, or are just someplace with really well protected (ie burried) lines, then this might not be as bad an idea as it sounds.