Well..., that was an adventure.
Some here may have heard, or been affected by, the unprecedented & seemingly now-historic windstorm that blew through KY, southern IN, northern TN and probably other states a week ago.
On Friday, March 3, a very severe and historically unprecedented wind storm swept through Kentucky, northern Tennessee and southern Indiana. A record wind gust of 69 MPH (111 KPH) was recorded at the Louisville International Airport (SDF) not far from us, and sustained winds of 50 ~ 65 MPH (80 ~ 96 KPH ) were common for many hours that evening. We were one of 290,000 electric utility customers without power at dawn the next day in Kentucky alone. Power went out at our home at 5:45 PM on Friday, and was not restored until 5:30 PM Wednesday, March 8, almost exactly five days without grid power or broadband.
An old friend retired from a career in Load Distribution with the local electric utility a few years ago. He said the LG&E/KU outage map was the ugliest he'd ever seen. That's sayin' something!
Our 8KW Generac portable generator consumed more than 30 gallons of fuel keeping refrigerator, freezer and a few critical lighting circuits running here at the house. There are still a few hundred electric utility customers in Louisville alone without power at this writing, many more without broadband. We had no broadband service during that five days, cell service was very unreliable, and our property sustained some minor damage in downed trees and a small burn in the side yard grass from a downed arcing line, but our house itself is undamaged. Our next door neighbor lost many shingles from his roof.to wind damage. We helped him with repair, using some spare shingles we had left over from our last roofing job. Many homes in Louisville are very seriously damaged (some probably totaled) by falling trees.
There were a few tornado touchdowns not far from us in Kentucky and southern Indiana during the Friday windstorm. The entrance to our neighborhood at the corner of our property was blocked for 36 hrs. by a downed tree and tangled electrical wires the tree took with it. We had to wait for the utility company to move the wires before we and a bunch of neighbors could start cutting the tree out of the way with chain saws so traffic in & out could flow.
Did storage maintenance on the gen prior to parking it in it's spot in the garage yesterday. It kept $1000.00+ of food from spoiling over the five days it ran, and kept us entertained with OTA TV at night. The gen plugs into a 30 amp port on the patio that's connected to a manual transfer switch on a sub-panel next to the main breaker panel. Last time the gen ran in anger (other than semi-annual testing) was about three yrs. ago, and it started & ran perfectly when called on last week. We charge the AGM starting battery once a month for an hour or so. We only run 100% pure gasoline in it (and all of our small motors), with Stabil storage formula mixed in. We rotate 25 gal. of stored fuel every two years as recommended by Stabil, so the fuel we were using was only about 18 mo. old. We'd like to run 100% gas ,in the Z1's, but the location of the oil company in southern IN is too inconvenient to do so.
Life has returned to what passes for normal around here. Lots of tree debris cleanup to attend to, some neighbors will require help for a while, but all in all, we dodged a Big Blow relatively unscathed. Now, if it would only warm up enough to go Ridin' comfortably...
Good Ridin'
slmjim & Z1BEBE
.