Well, we've all decided to stay up past our bedtimes because, well, as anxiety-producing as this hurricane has been, and still is, it's sort of exciting, especially with the generator going outside.
It's raining pretty torrentially here. It started raining about midday, but rather lightly. It was pretty solid and steady by late afternoon. Since about 8 pm, it's been coming down in great buckets. It's pretty gusty outside, but I'd guesstimate the winds aren't steadily blowing more than 30 mph or maybe a bit more. Gusts are probably over 40 mph.
So, right now, it's just a real good soaker of a rainstorm. It's supposed to peak somewhat later tonight.
I live about five or six miles from Annapolis, as the crow flies, about half a mile from the headwaters of the South River, in south central Anne Arundel County. I'm a little north of Route 50.
In Anne Arundel County, about 60,000 households have lost power on BGE’s grid out of about 235,000 households. That number will probably climb.
The sump pump is easily handling the flow of water, but it's a great deal of water, and it's non-stop. Without the backup power (and thus, the operational sump pump), the basement, which is in the process of being finished, would be flooded by now.
The standby generator, 20KW running on propane, was only installed this week, finally. I knew that if we were going to finish the basement, I had to have a permanent solution to power outages and the problems they can cause for us, especially during heavy rainstorms. It isn't unusual for us to lose power here.
I think our contractor who is finishing the basement was getting annoyed with me, because I kept giving him a bad time about hooking up the generator. I've had it here for about six weeks.
Glad I insisted.
sitetest
Sitetest, I’m listening to St. Mary’s scanner right now. The situation there sounds really crazy.
Good job staying on top of the generator installation. Not a moment too soon!
20 KW is a HUGE (Hugh?) generator for one house. You could go completely off-grid, with that. And so could two of your neighbors.
With load averaging, we used to allow 5KW per house, including A/C. Double that for today’s wired world, I guess - but that has to be overkill. A/C burns more than everything else in your house, unless you have electric strip heat.