Lights went out !!

[WA3VJB]

7:08 the power went out during the remnants of Ernesto.

Now on the genset, tall cold beer, watchin' TV, checking the compooter.

Ah, this is emergency preparedness !

[WA3VJB]

Was 26,000 in my county an hour after the went out, now 46,000 two hours later.

[Jim, W5JO]

Hope you have enough fuel for the generator Paul.  I would bet the bands are a bit quiter now. 

[WA3VJB]

Yeah Jim, it's nice to have a 20gal tank in the boat, filled and with fittings, plus a 6 gal portable tank.

We can get out too, and they power outages are down to 41,000 here in our county.
Now 14 hours since outage, and here's the thing, the power came up briefly this morning, for about ten minutes, then went out again. 

So we powered back up on the genset for coffee and to refresh the fridges.

[Jim, W5JO]

Paul, I live at the end of a rural line and power outages of 2-3 hours are not uncommon.  This is a forested area so limbs have a habit of falling across the line.  I have a 12 KW industrial gen. that will run my entire house in normal operation except for the heat strips in the HVAC.  It really is nice to be able to have a hot shower, hot dirnks and cook the food. 

I keep 15 gallons and an Oklahoma credit card to supply the gen.  The pickup has a 30 gallon tank so in a pinch I could last quite a while.  The only bad part is the gen. weighs about 450 lbs with full fuel.   They called it a portable set because they added axles and wheels to the frame.  The damn thing is so heavy that the wheels almost won't hold it.

I hope the power comes on soon and things get back to normal.  In the meantime enjoy.

[K3ZS]

A generator is necessary here.    With a well and pump, you can't flush a toilet without power.    Every year a squirrel gets fried on the HV line running up the road and blows a breaker on the pole.    Before deregulation, it would have been reset within an hour.   Now it takes a few hours for a supervisor to check it out and about 12 hours for someone to come along to use a long pole to reset the breaker.  After the Y2K fiasco, generators were pretty cheap so I picked up a 5KW.   Good luck on getting your power back, Paul.   Where do you get the maps of the power outage?   Is that a national thing or does the local electric company put them out?

[WA3VJB]

We too are at the end of the line, a neighborhood of about a dozen houses surrounded by farm fields and woods. Got a 4KW Coleman about 15 yrs ago soon after moving in, eyeing the situation, and have used it regularly in the time since. Upgraded to one with a larger tank and a low oil sensor same power level, and still portable enough to, say, take out on an AM expedition somewhere.

The problem with these smaller gensets is regulation. I have several commercial quality UPS units around the house, and even on their most relaxed settings they still won't take the genset voltage sometimes, depending on what else happens to be running, like the fridge. It's not just voltage, and I suspect there's either some dirt on the waveform or distortion on the sinewave.

Right now, I'm powering up the wi-fi down a fiber, since we are way past the 4 hours they promise out of the gel cel backup.  Also glad I kept the metallic pair telephone line, independent of the fiber.  They will argue and complain and act like they can't keep the services split, since they want to toss everyone over to cheaper fiber to get away from older infrastructure of buried copper.

The outage maps are pretty common on your utility company website. Do a Google search for your utility company,  the word "outage" and the county or locality you live within.

[k4kyv]

Isn't Shelby this weekend?  Wonder how the storm will affect attendance.

Power goes out here all the time, storm or no storm.  I have a very nice 18" diameter professional grade 40's-50's vintage 24-hour electric clock for my shack that I pulled out of a dumpster about 35 years ago.  I easily repaired it and it still looks and works nicely, but it's a real pain to reset.  Have to take it off the wall and manipulate a certain cogwheel on the clock mechanism.

I finally gave up on the thing and unplugged it.  Whenever I reset it, it rarely goes more than two or three days before the power shuts down long enough to make it to lose anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of hours.  I like to have a clock set to within a  few seconds of WWV. I now use a cheap battery powered digital POS to keep track of the time.

If I didn't have a UPS, I would never be able to run a long download or scan the HDD, because the power frequently flicks off just for a second or two, just long enough to make the computer reboot and lose anything unsaved.

And we are located less than a mile  from the substation.  I have complained to the power company many times, but they have never done anything to improve it.

[The Slab Bacon]

I wuz at the bench working on the SX-28 last night. Listening to 75m and amazed how good the condx were. (I was tasting a dood radio fix!!) About 8:00 pm N3HIA and KB3CBC came by for a visit. We went upstairs to fire off a pot o joe and around 9:00 out went the lites!! No thunder no noise no nothing.

The storm had very little elictrical activity and before I went upstairs the statique level was the lowest I have heard since last winter. I was tasting some good radio!

A drive around survey showed that this whole corner of the county was dark. we still dont know what the hell happened. At 11:00 still no power. I went out to the garage and looked at my 1950 US Power and Light generator, it was buried with bu too much szht, more than I really felt like moving. I said "screw it and went back into the house.

With no power, I decided to chase the yl around instead of playig radio, was a good night anyway!!

                                                                               the Slab Bacon

[John Holotko]

Isn't Shelby this weekend?  Wonder how the storm will affect attendance.

Power goes out here all the time, storm or no storm.  I have a very nice 18" diameter professional grade 40's-50's vintage 24-hour electric clock for my shack that I pulled out of a dumpster about 35 years ago.  I easily repaired it and it still looks and works nicely, but it's a real pain to reset.  Have to take it off the wall and manipulate a certain cogwheel on the clock mechanism.

I finally gave up on the thing and unplugged it.  Whenever I reset it, it rarely goes more than two or three days before the power shuts down long enough to make it to lose anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of hours.  I like to have a clock set to within a  few seconds of WWV. I now use a cheap battery powered digital POS to keep track of the time.

If I didn't have a UPS, I would never be able to run a long download or scan the HDD, because the power frequently flicks off just for a second or two, just long enough to make the computer reboot and lose anything unsaved.

And we are located less than a mile  from the substation.  I have complained to the power company many times, but they have never done anything to improve it.

You'd think that being in a more urbanized area the power conditions would be more stable here  but no dice. We frequently get momentaty outages lasting a few seconds or more, just enough to reset digital clocks,put the vcr/dvd out of commission etc. I learned quickly  that a UPS is not a luxury, it's a MUST HAVE if you have a computer. And every now and then we'll get these outages where the lights will start flickering on and off on and off rapidly for several minutes and then it will go dead completely for an hour or two then come back. Never  any explaination for why.

[WA2TTP Steve]

Hi John,

Maybe I can shed some "light" on why your power interuption does what it does. I worked in Electric System operations for about 29 years (now retired) in the bulk power transmission end but I have some knowledge of distribution systems. Since you live in Yonkers I assume your served by ConEd on one of there radial distribution circuits as opposed to there network systems that are used NYC. The radial circuit is fed from a substation bus, usually 13kv, with about 600 amp capacity. There is a circuit breaker for each feeder out of sub. The CB's are monitored by several sets of relays which controls when it will trip. One set is the instataneous over current relay (IOC) that will trip the CB as soon as it sees fault current at it's set point. The other set is the time over current relay (TOC) which works on a inverse curve that varies the time the relay will wait to trip the cb depending what the current flow is. High current will trip faster than lower values but never as fast as the IOC relay. The third player is the auto circuit reclosure (ACR) timer which will attempt to close the tripped CB several times and also blocks the IOC relay from tripping the CB after the "0" second reclose. A common timing setup would be 0-30-20 seconds. The "0" means the ACR will attempt to close the CB as soon as it trips, if it trips again it will try again in 30 seconds and again in 20 seconds. If it doesn't stay closed after the 20 second try, third attempt, then the circuit is said to be "locked out". At this point it can only be closed by an operator at the sub or via remote control.

In an area like yours the distribution circuit might leave the sub as 3 phase main line a go several miles through the area with many single phase (buck phases) runs down various streets. Along the main line and at each buck phase there are fuses. The values start at maybe 10 amps on a small buck phase section to 100's on the 3 phase sections. These fuses also have curves, current vs time.

Sorry for running long on this! But this is how the the whole thing comes together. Lets say lightning strikes the buck phase running down your block. The IOC relay would see this as a fault and trip the CB and ACR would attempt to close it. Being a lightning strike caused the trip it most likely would stay closed. You would just see just quick off/on of your lights. Now lets say high wind snapped off a tree limb that now falls across the line causing a permanent fault. The IOC relay see the fault and trips the CB. The ACR attempts to close the CB and fails the first time, it waits 30 seconds now with the just the TOC relay which will allow the CB to stay closed long enough to blow the buck phase fuse at the end of your street. The result is all the people on the circuit (Thousands of them) see there lights out for 30 seconds and you get out the candle. The whole idea is to minimize the amount of the circuit affected by the tree limb. The size and curve of the fuses are, in theory, are coordinated with the curves of TOC relay so that the right fuses blow at the right times. While this fault is occuring on your circuit people on other circuits out of the same sub may see there lights flicker or dim just because of dips of the substation bus voltage. There are many other combinations of events that could happen but this should give you rough idea of what goes on. One thing you can do is check how well the trees are trimmed away from the lines. Tree trimming seems to be the first thing on the chopping block when budgets get tight. A complaint to the PSC about your outages may help also.

73,
Steve
WA2TTP

[John Holotko]

Steve, thanks for the very detailed and very interesting explaination. Yes we are served by Con Edison (my dad used to work for them) and yep the situation you describe sounds exactly like it coincided precidely with things I have seen happening around here both past and present. I am in Yokkers, which is part of Westchester County and most of Westchester is on an above ground overhead distribution system.  Intersring on the arrangemment with the circuit breakers and fuses. I knew they used arrangements of fuses and cb's  but was never exactly sure how it all worked or  that they utilized a  timing arrangmement. But yes  what I have noticed happen during local power outages more or less coincided with what you described.

As far as tree trimming goes I remember they used to send trucks around almost annually to trime dead and overhanging branches away from the wires. Mastter of fact I reemeber them removing a dead tree from the front of my house years ago. When I inquired about it they toldme that con ed was paying for the job. At one time I heard a rumor that the power company might even pay to have a sick or dead tree removed from a property if they felt it  posed a  threat to the lines. These days I haven'tnoticed them trimming as regularly as they used to. It could be they've scaled back or maybe I just haven'tbeen around when they were doing the trimming.

Meanwhile thanks for the great info.Much appreciated.

John/ize

[WA3VJB]

33 hours total outage.
Time to change the oil.

[Jim, W5JO]

Ok about the oil, how is the beer holding out?

[John Holotko]

My neighborhood got hit pretty hard. Lots of downed trees, wires, and even poles busted in half.  Good chunk of my area has been out with no power for several days now. We'rel lucky, we stayed on althout it looked like we were gonna loose it for a while. This storm packed much higher winds and a lot more whallop than the 10-15mph winds the forecasters predicted. They really underestimated this one.

[Ed-VA3ES]

We're very lucky here in Ottawa. Our electrical distribution is very reliable.  We have so few interuptions per year, that it's not worth buying a generator.  We have a local emporium (similar to Harbor Freight) that sells very nice, self-start 10KW gennies for about $2600. (C).  I've been sorely tempted many times, but why bother?

Now, when we lived in Montreal, that was a whole different story.  The electrical infrastructure in Quebec is  so decrepit, that we  used to suffer from  outages at least once a month. Some were only  a couple of hours, others,  several hours, up to eight hours!   Everyone has generators there.

[wa2zdy]

The problem with the UPS and generator isn't the voltage, it's the frequency.  UPSs are very intolerant of frequency excursions away from 60 Hz.   And of course generator RPM affects that directly.

[W3RSW]

Paul-
woah, sorry to hear about the power loss. Hope your back on by now. Over on this side of the mountains just some rain out of the whole deal.
Are you still going to try to make farfester?
if so see'mn' you there.
Rick

[WA3VJB]

Rick, yes, power returned Sunday, only to go out agn this morning
At least it was after coffee and hot shower.

A lot of trouble going on, what with a favorite cat dying on us and another of the three looking aggrieved and ailing herself now.

Will spend at least a little time at GBurg, but not prolonged.  Hope CU there.

[John Holotko]

Rick, yes, power returned Sunday, only to go out agn this morning
At least it was after coffee and hot shower.

A lot of trouble going on, what with a favorite cat dying on us and another of the three looking aggrieved and ailing herself now.

Will spend at least a little time at GBurg, but not prolonged.  Hope CU there.

Paul, you're neighbors shouldn't have any problem getting power. All they need is a coil of wire, a diode and they  can rectify some of that massive RF that you're kickin out of the shack  there. Should be enough to run the fridge and a few AC's till the regular juice comes back.  

[W3RSW]

Paul, Sorry about your berevement.
Well if you do make it over to G'burg we'll cheer you up.
I'm a'headin' out in a few hours; planning on camping at the site.
I presume antenna hanging is Fri. afternoon.

For all who are coming to the fester;
Sue won't make it this year.
She has, however, baked up her usual stellar choc. chip cookies.  They don't last long.
-
Rick