Posted: 8/7/2016 4:53:58 PM EDT
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I live in rural Virginia on 80+ acres. About 1230 today, power went out. First thought was everyone with a/c on max blew a transformer. No biggie. Wife called power company, "we'll call someone in". Waited 2 hours, no power. Started up Subaru generator, gift from BIL. Refrigerator, fan working.
Then the "crazy me" kicked in. Strapped on a 9mm. Thought about EMP. Decided to try some stuff out. Have 2 lawn tractor batteries I keep charged up. Hooked up inverter, charged cell phone, ran laptop. Worked great! Lessons learned: keep a few good batteries on hand. Keep generator ready to go. Power came back at 1500. All is well. |
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We get the outages here in the Summer, usually during a storm. It's always a good prepper exercise to see if everything works like it should. We've also found that if it's a large area outage the water pressure starts to fail as the Rural Water tower pumps aren't filling the towers as they normally would. I usually don't run the generators for household things until after a couple of hours have gone by.
Another thing I've learned is that you can tell roughly how large an area is involved after dark by turning on night vision and looking around the horizon. City lights will light up the sky for quite a distance. This will give you an idea of how serious it might be, |
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One of the true beauties of prepareing for the big SHTF situation is most all that stuff can be used to save you butt or just plain improve your quality of life when the day to day pain in the ass things happen.
Works the other way also , the little things act as a good test to see what works and what might be prepared |
Quickest way I have found around here to get grid power back on is to drag out the generator and extension cords and fire everything up. Grid is usually back up in minutes  Power went out about three or four weeks ago (line down) waited on it about 2-3 hours and still hadn't come on. It was pretty warm so I decided to fire up the genny and cool the freezer and refrigerators down. Had them all hooked up and running and literally within five minutes power was back on.
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Quoted:
I need to get off my butt and run my generator..hasn't been run since last year. Good to have all the things you need isn't it? We lose power in the winter around here. The last outage my neighbors house was down to 40 degrees inside. Only took a few hours. Ditto... I haven't touched mine since there was still some snow lingering around the yard. I cycled the gas rand them for a half hour then packed them back up. I need to do it again ASAP. |