Power Down Wakeup Call

[Tarrel]

I was one of the 200,000 people affected by the Scotland-wide power outage this evening. We lost power for around 2.5 hours.

Good news:
- Rayburn worked well, giving heating, hot water and a kettle for coffee
- emergency light / grab-torch came on as required

Not so good news:
- I realised I've no idea where my head torch is, and it would have been useful
- I have a leisure battery and 300w inverter for these types of situation, but the battery wasn't fully charged.

7/10 must try harder!

[Lightspeed]

Hi Tarrel,

A good real life test of your preparedness. You passed the test it seems:-)

Re leisure battery being partialy discharged: Our solution is to use the leisure batteries to power the house burglar alarm (if power cuts, the alarm will stay active for at least 3 months) The batteries are permanently charged using a smart charger. This means that they are always 100% good to go when our mains power drops out.

This system works well. The only issue we had was finding a smart charger that would not revert to a standby condition after mains power was restored. If you are sure to be at home to re-set the smart charging cycle, this is not an issue of course. From time to time Lidl and Aldi sell really well made smart chargers for around £15.... these are of the manual re-set variety.

Stay safe up there!

[Nix]

One item to consider would be one of those small solar panel chargers. It'd only be a trickle charge but, once you connect it up, you could virtually forget about it and it should keep your battery tip top (bar any heavy demands). The more serious you are about solar panels, the more involved it would be ie bigger panels and separate controllers etc. Worthwhile IMHO.

[Scythe13]

(16 April 2014, 23:49)Tarrel Wrote: 7/10 must try harder!

I'll give you a 6.5 out of 10 hehe. I'm kidding mate. It's a good wake up call, as you said.

Have you got a trickle charger for the battery? It won't give LOADS of power, but I'm sure you could just wire a couple of them in. It's free electricity, and trickle chargers are pretty cheap.

---

Oh, just read Nix's comment.

[Barneyboy]

i think the real test is if you would cope,and make do to your best with what you have ,we as preppers,we cant have every scenario prepared for .keep calm and carry on

[Tarrel]

The irritating, and embarrassing, thing is I have a smart charger (Lidl - £14.99). Just hadn't got round to putting the (fairly new) battery on it! Also, the battery was in one place, the charger in another, the extension lead somewhere else. Lesson learned; have a "go" box of all the necessary items, so that it is easy to pick up the (charged) battery, connect the inverter, run the extension lead and plug in our mission-critical items - all by torchlight if necessary.

The other thing we were reminded of, is that the Number One benefit that electricity provides is light, followed probably by refrigeration. We have LED halogen-replacement down-lighters in our kitchen (5 Watts each). When the power came back on, by way of an experiment, I turned them all off bar one. The light that this single 5W LED provided was so much greater than that of the four candles we'd had lit during the power cut. There was no comparison. Technically, a 100Ah car battery could power such a bulb 24 hours a day for 10 days straight!

On a related issue, it's quite worrying that nobody has yet figured out what caused the outage.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-27058766

[Jonas]

Only 2 1/2 hours. We lose power here for four hours or so every other month. The local electric co-operative's chief engineer is neither the best nor brightest in the industry.

[Bucket]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-27074314

"Transient fault"- translation "it broke, but its fixed now, we don't know how it's fixed"

Bet its those suicide seagulls again.

Was (and still am) working in Aberdeen, should be fun when I get home tomorrow.

[Mortblanc]

Back in August 2003 we had a situation where a squirrel shorting out the lines blacked out power to 50 million people for 3-5 days.

We generally expect out power grid to go down for 3-5 days of every year and any time during storms or natural disasters, that is one of the primary reasons for my preps.

I have never experienced a collapse of the social order, financial collapse or invasion by aliens, but I really get ticked off when the icecream melts!

[Barneyboy]

good to see you have your priorities wright MB mate