Power (and Coffee)

A few weeks ago we had a power outage. You can see from the map above it didn’t just affect us. The whole Fundy Isles, Coast, and a big chunk of Mainland went dark. It only lasted 1 hour (whew). I’m certain that the big power project installing underwater cables from Deer Island through us and then to Grand Manan had nothing to do with it. 🙂

Many expected our power to go out Saturday night because of the big thunderstorm. As it happens the storm had passed before I went to bed and the electricity was humming along normally. That ended at approx. 1:30 am Sunday. Power was restored this morning – 30 hours later.

I received a text at 5:00 am yesterday telling me of the problem from somebody who knows that, unless I have a cup of coffee, when I wake up I’m worth about $0.40. We went down to the boat, got a generator, returned to the house and hooked up my coffee maker (yay). Then we drove around watching the world wake up while I ingested caffeine.

I’ve tried to put the necessary measures in place to deal with situations like this. A few lessons were learned.

Typhoon Freda hit Vancouver in 1962. I can remember that the power was out for a few days – which meant no school. I don’t remember any problem with the water supply. This is not the case if you use a well.

I have jugs of water stored for such an emergency – the toilet does require them. It turns out my supply is barely adequate for an outage 30 hours long – I’ll have to increase the amount of jugs in the basement to handle longer situations. There are options for filling them on the Island – but in the middle of winter they’d be unavailable.

Rules of thumb are published by Government agencies concerning the length of time frozen food will remain unspoiled. It turns out that a full freezer keeps things colder longer (of course). The trick, apparently, if your freezer isn’t full is to keep jugs of water in it so they can freeze and maintain the low temperatures much longer.  I hadn’t done that.

I do have portable power banks for charging my phone and tablet (and those of friends). They were invaluable. I do need to be much more diligent about keeping them fully charged themselves and a few more (with assorted cables) would be a good idea.

Someday I will buy a generator which can power the house if necessary. I did have the wiring put in place for one – in fact my power requirements are small enough I wouldn’t have to pick and choose what I could do without. I’ll move the generator up my list of eventual purchases.

The good news is that things are running fine now. I had coffee without needing to string a power cable out to the driveway. I can have a shower (which will please everybody who can tell I mowed the lawn in the hot sun yesterday) and I can even access the interwebs to do this post.

Unfortunately, I have to go empty the fridge, the freezer attached to it, and the big one in the basement. Ah well. I’ll make sure to replace all that meat with some jugs filled with water and get them turning to ice. Just in case. The power project isn’t going to be finished for a while. 🙂