Living off the grid is a fine thing if you are set up for it. In a house designed for steady electrical input? High stress situation. ~7000W generator, here I come.
Generator placement – garage or basement? Neither! With today’s quieter engines, locating the generator in one’s bedroom is now feasible! The other obvious location – the kitchen – is already tight because you’ve brought the gas BBQ in (haven’t you?).
Why was this storm so much worse in terms of outages than the ice storm of 1998? Did NH just get hit harder this time? I’ll never forget the pictures of high-tension towers in Quebec and upstate New York crumpled and folded – the next summer, the Design Student and I took a trip to Montreal and the tree damage was apparent everywhere. This time, the ice accumulation was lighter – here on the coast – but the numbers of houses w/o power was up by a factor of four. I’m going to keep an eye on post mortems and not rely too much on anecdote.
Suspect you are a low priority – few houses on a rural street, not too much whining compared with Portsmouth etc.
And maybe the trees grew in the last decade and they cut back on trimming etc.
We were all out but CMP was on scene before the fire engine in a couple of cases! Most power restored by Monday 5 pm. Not like two weeks ago when we waited for 6 hours and then cleared when the local variety store (selling 6packs) closed.
Suspect you are a low priority – few houses on a rural street, not too much whining compared with Portsmouth etc.
And maybe the trees grew in the last decade and they cut back on trimming etc.
We were all out but CMP was on scene before the fire engine in a couple of cases! Most power restored by Monday 5 pm. Not like two weeks ago when we waited for 6 hours and then cleared when the local variety store (selling 6packs) closed.