Derecho Power Outage

It has been a very interesting week following the Derecho that blew through the mid atlantic region on Friday June 26th.  Our power, along with countless others, was off for 8 days. We were fortunate not to have any damage on our farm nor did we have any major trees blown down.  Others were less fortunate.  I blogged some months ago (The Quest for Power, January 10, 2012) about our generator setup. Briefly, it is a 7000W portable generator converted to run on our wellhead natural gas.  It is wired to our service panel and with judicious flipping of switches, will power everything in our house...just not all at once. We installed it in fall 2011 and because of our mild winter this past year, we did not need to use it until now.  We started the outage with 0.5 hours on the meter and ended it with 95 hours.  I figured that by using natural gas, we saved about 10 5-gallon cans of gasoline (which was largely unavailable) and a lot of refueling.  We are very fortunate here to have that set up.  The only thing we did without was internet because I was afraid to plug my computer and modems into generator power.  I managed - somehow. 


Natural gas regulator.