Posted on 01/07/2019 6:46:48 PM PST by fireman15
No matter how solid the grid is, nothing is going to prevent you from losing power when a tree takes down power lines in your neighborhood.
I live in the Northeast where this is a normal occurrence. Power crews have it down to science, we usually get our power back in hours. Sometimes we get a very major storm event and we have to wait a few days because there are literally thousands of trees that have fallen across the region. But this does not mean the power grid is fragile. In fact, I'm always amazed at how quickly and efficiently the crews work to get everything back online.
It must be a great place to escape to.
Mid winter pipe damage to the main residence is a concern
I am not sure if you are talking about two different structures. It would seem like with a hand pump in the kitchen that the amount of plumbing that you have is very minimal and the water is not under pressure even if the pipes do crack. But with a system that old you might want to make sure that the pipes are not made out of lead that could be contaminating your water.
Each one of those “Windmills” costs a couple of million dollars. In terms of energy produced they can NEVER recover that cost alone.Maintenance, insurance, market, land aquisition etc, . Basically that energy cannot be stored and must be used somewhere as it is produced. At the present level of the technology it is nothing but a scam.When you see those windmills sitting idle you are watching a multi-million dollar factory effectively shuttered, producing no product. Who can afford to do that? Smile taxpayer. IOW to see who benefits...follow the money.
The power in our neighborhood is underground, the problem is that before it gets to us our power comes from overhead lines surrounded by trees from a substation that is further in the woods than we are. By contrast the power on the west side of the runway comes from a substation that is just a mile or so away and closer to an urban area, so they seldom lose power. But this latest storm even took down their lines and made a spectacular light show when it did.
Our ace in the hole is the underground gas lines that come to our neighborhood. They are not affected by windstorms and give us a reasonably priced alternative when the power goes out. During outages running our generator costs us about $10 a day vs $3 a day for power from the grid.
We know a couple people who live off the grid; they use wind and solar to supplement their propane powered generator to charge the storage batteries that powers their inverter. Propane costs approximately 3 times as much per BTU as natural gas. When they had their system designed they made the assumption that the generator would be supplementing the wind and solar power. It doesn’t work that way for them except for about two months in the middle of the summer.
It was two miles to the nearest utility pole and they could have had those lines strung for less than what their off the grid system cost. But the contractor who set up their system convinced them it would be cheaper in the long run. Within a few months they realized that they had made a mistake. Even in that limited type of system where it almost looks like it would work out... you really have to look at the numbers thoroughly and take system maintenance and ongoing expenses into account. Our friends were blinded by their desire to be energy independent
Two structures.
The getaway is a new well, new pipes, with a new hand pump. They still make ‘em. I do have to filter for drinking water, and I have a Big Berkey™ Water Filter, counter top model for that. You could put ditch water through it and its drinkable.
That is neat. I have a couple of water filters for emergencies that are meant to make nasty water safe. Essential equipment as far as I am concerned
When I read your description it made me think of old log cabins that my dad owns. We loved them when we were kids in the 1960s. Unfortunately they are now falling apart from lack of maintenance. They originally had lead pipes and the water came from a creak behind them. Those old lead pipes outlasted steel by a factor of about ten, but they leached lead oxide into the water.
Hardly any power outages here though bcz of them. .
But at an average wind speed of 31.44 mph (?) the District of Columbia / 633,736 by far is the windiest state.
It also sent the fewest people into the military, compared with the 50 states.
Guessing there were a lot of blow-downs in the Cascades.
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