power hits f'srs again

[solarbird]

Major storm moving through and Stage 2 power alerts going off - murknet may be going offline Real Soon Now. This would be the second power outage in two days. NOT HAPPY.

Comments

[wytwolf.livejournal.com]

Just got hit with the storm really bad. Couldn't pick up my roommate from work because of a fallen tree. Scariest drive of my life. It was a wall of water and wind with branches thrown in for good measure.

Be safe!

[solarbird]

Still stormy this morning! But much less so.

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

Our power blipped for about thirty seconds and came back. Naturally one of my servers failed to come back cleanly - the USB key that it boots from no longer works in high-speed (although still works full-speed), two of the drives on the initial boot showed up as "Unformatted", but all appears well on the second boot. Now begins a 20 hour parity check to make sure the drive array is sane. Yay.

Fuck weather. Also, I need to buy more UPSes.

[solarbird]

I thought you'd bought one of those whole-house natural-gas generators after the big storms three years ago, with the week-long outage. No? Or does it just take longer than that to kick in?

Also, if you did, how much did that set you back? I'm getting real interested.

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we have one, but it takes fifteen or thirty seconds of power loss before it turns on, and even then it doesn't power the entire house, just carefully selected portions of it, and it doesn't power the media servers unless I go downstairs and plug stuff in differently.

I don't remember what it cost us exactly, but I think it was around $10K.

[partywhipple.livejournal.com]

Do you have gas heat or a fireplace? Gas heat doesn't work when the power is out either, does it? I can't remember. Dangit.

We hgave a fireplace. I need to remember to actually get wood for it!

[solarbird]

Our house has two! gas fireplaces. When we first moved in I thought "ugh, gas fireplace, when we have money again I'll get those changed out for real," and then during one of the first severe blackouts we had somebody hit one of the wall switches (!) that turns one up from pilot-only to full-on and it worked, which made my brain explode. (A thermocouple, of course, but the idea hadn't even crossed my mind because it was a light switch like any other.)

So they work during blackouts, and, turns out, we get blackouts All! The! Damn! Time! And now I see their utility, and they aren't going anywhere.

But I miss my wood fireplaces. I really do.

Gas central heat doesn't work like that tho'. You need the fans to run or the water pumps (if you have radiators) so no joy. But the hot water tank does, and that's very nice.

[partywhipple.livejournal.com]

yeah, if our elec goes out at the new place we are fuxxored majorly. Hence the needing the wood. I wish I could put in a wood burning stove. they are so much better than a regular fireplace. Sadly, it would be a waste of money since I may move in a year and not have a fireplace where ever I end up. Also, the woodburning stoves ain't cheap!

[solarbird]

Someday I want a soapstone woodburning stove. I love those sooooooo much. Expensive, tho'.

[partywhipple.livejournal.com]

My mother is obsessed with them. We have 5 in the house up in New York. Seriously.

[solarbird]

I bet they're all fired up today. I got friends in Ontario and Niagara on the NYS side. It's cold.

[partywhipple.livejournal.com]

Yeah it is. hell, it's friggin cold here in VA. And I mean for anywhere, not just VA. High here is 28 today. That's not too shabby.

[maellenkleth]

The weather is definitely whacky this winter, because here in northern Massachusetts (inland, and uphill) it is 44 F today.

[dpawtows.livejournal.com]

You can get fireplace inserts that are improvements over a bare fireplace, efficiency-wise. But yeah, you'd never make it up in a year, and it won't add much to the sale price of the house.

[maellenkleth]

I keep meaning to ask, and finally remembered:

is this a personal classification of power outages, or is it more widely in use?

and how are the stages defined?

[solarbird]

Oh, it's just what we use here. It's mostly ad hoc, but I do have definitions for it:

Stage 0: Noticeable light flickers.
Stage 1: Noticeable light flickers, at least one UPS alarm triggered.
Stage 2: Power blinks out but for <1 second, devices reset, at least two UPS alarms triggered.
Stage 3: Power out completely for at least 1 full second. "...but no more than five minutes" is still kinda part of this but we never really get that without going to full power outage, so Stage 3 is effectively full power out. That said, we still wait the 5-ish minutes before declaring full power out and shutting down servers if we have reason to believe it might come back on before the timeout. You never see this 'cause it doesn't happen in real life.
We don't call it "Stage 4" but the next step is complete power outage, full-system emergency shutdown.

[maellenkleth]

Ah, very clear and useful classification, and much better than the sort of marketese that one tends (alas) to get from commercial service providers.

Much obliged, Ma'am!

[solarbird]

(Really there's no difference between "at least two" and "all," in practical experience, but I don't want to say "all" because I'm a pedant and can't be sure they're all going off. XD )

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

could you take a minute to vote for my entry?
(We had all been born Polish, but some of us were more Polish than others.)
I wouldn't bother you, but it's really close and I want to win.
http://jongibbs.livejournal.com/146817.html

[mikec1157.livejournal.com]

We didn't lose power, and am a little "shocked" we didn't.

We were warned that this was going to be a bad winter...we have wood and a fireplace insert that has a flat top that we could cook on if needed be...oh and Zero, our youngest cat who grew up in LV, really likes to be near it...anyway, if the winter is as bad as predicted, we'll use up all our wood....which is fine as it's time to get through it...

Oh, and I have a LED patio umbrella light (dough-nut shape of light) that works real well as a general light source hanging at the entrance to the living room giving light to the living room, kitchen and part of the hall. My walker has it's own lights. Oh, the patio umbrella light was great...until a week later when its hook decide to slip, fall and hit the vinyl floor with big crash knocking all the parts and batteries and senting ALL the cats in many directions. No one hurt, and we just snapped everything back together and all was fine. Sadly we have no video of the cats flying.