I wish I could at times.
Hospitals, Data centers, Natural gas plants, etc… all have to stay running.
Let’s hope that this cold snap doesn’t cause rolling blackouts or drops in gas pressure cause people to loose heat.
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For those who are unfamiliar with this weather: please note that all or 4-wheel drive may help you accelerate, but doesn’t help you stop.
The intersections are slick. Please give yourself space and time to stop.
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Mercifully, no rolling blackouts (although there was an outage of about 15 minutes earlier in the day) and gas has been dependable.
Per ERCOT as of about 2 minutes ago, there was a 3.8 GW reserve available statewide. However, local grids might be nearing capacity, thus there’s still the possibility of blackouts.
We have not hit the worst of the cold and peak heating yet. If we survive through Tuesday…
I can’t remember the last time I needed to shovel my walkway and broom my car off. And actually did it!
My good friend in Kansas owns a heating and air company. As he says the problem with loss of power means your central gas heat doesn’t run - or more accurately the fan motors don’t. The actual gas works fine. he adapted his central with a regular electrical plug between the motor and the electrical source. when they have a blackout he merely runs an extension cord from an outside generator, unplugs the central and plugs it into the extension cord. Stays warm all night. He made a small fortune one winter making the same modification for lots of his customers. Lets hope it doesn’t come to that here.
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Would putting an appropriatly spec’d uninterrupted power supply (UPS) unit inline between the outed and furnace do the same trick. I am talking specifically gas furnace, as you have pointed out.
If by ups you mean standby generator then yes. None of us poor schleps could afford that sorta backup battery system
Even a small electric 3/4-1.0 hp motor at 120V is going to suck the power out of one of those really quickly. But a 2kW generator would be running at about 50%-60% load
Isn’t this why Elon and Bill Gates engineered this weather system to move through here, making the Tesla Power Wall seem almost worth it? Well, Bills more into making his GENERAC investment pay off, but either way, their club wins…
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as pointed out that could work if spec’d right, but wouldn’t have enough battery life to run long.
Oh and I should point out that more than a few Darwin Award winners died from carbon monoxide poisoning that winter trying to run their appliances using gas powered generators indoors.
You can contact the University of Alaska Fairbanks to see if they started HAARP back up after taking control of it from the US Air Force back in late summer, 2015. They might be the ones more responsible for this.
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Snazzy hat!
You should teach a class on making those…
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If we lived somewhere with less reliable power it might even make sense to wire up a transfer switch and put an RV type outlet outside that just feeds the furnace.
I installed this and it worked like a champ; outside of some weird fuses if you needed them.
It connects to 10 circuits on your house and then you connect a UPS.
I used a 2300VA UPS but use whatever you can find that is 120volts.
It can be setup to connect the circuits to the UPS or generator or utility only.
It had a lot of flexibility. I had it hooked up to a 30 amp RV style plug on the outside of the house. If you plan ahead you can also have it start your generator for automatic operation.
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Great job making lemonade from a molehill…
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stealing…
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