Great save, Diana and Raf!

You folks on the coast have been battered with weather for weeks now that I cannot even comprehend dealing with. And that's coming from an Albertan where weather can be deadly cold and unpredictable. Everyone on the coast deserves a medal for braving the storms and power outages. I'm sure there are many who have not fared nearly as well as you :sad:

Think it's rather bizzare in a major area such as North Van (and other areas in the lower main land) this occurs. Can't even remember once in all the years I've been in Edmonton we've had the power out for more than 1/2 an hour.

Even in the rural areas of Alberta long duration outages are rare. Play around with some radar sites sort of in the four corners of the Province. They all have gensets and know about the only time they run is when someone is one site for checks. We'll get the odd bump but usually so short we just carry load on UPSs and utility returns before the generator even starts.

Thanks for the comments guys :)

andresont,

the coil idea may work but Diana thought of a rather simple idea(works best if your have a gas powered hot water tank) is to fill 2L pop bottles with HOT water and float them in the tanks. It helped one of our clients tanks bringing it up from a frigid 55F!

Yeah the southern coast has had a *rough* winter so far. On Friday morning we got winds up to 100 kms an hour. I've heard its the hardest storm in history to hit Vancouver.... and the Island got it even worse.... needless to say lots of people lost power, which is why its taking so long for Hydro to hook it all back up. I think the last power-out we got here at our house was a few years ago. The lady down the street from me STILL hasnt gotten her power back, but her fish are doing fine in our tank.

woodcarver, check out the thread "Sad Sad Day without Power" in this forum, there is a huge discussion on generators. :)


:)
-Diana

Good job you two.

For Albertans, the huge difference is that we have soooo many trees around here that when a huge windstorms kicks up, many of them get knocked down. Just in Stanley Park, in downtown Vancouver, they estimate THOUSANDS of trees are down, the park is closed & they expect to still be cleaning up & repairing all the damage months, even a year from now. We live in a Coastal Rainforest type region & our trees get very tall, but when developers only leave one or two standing here & there, it creates the perfect situation for the wind to knock them down onto powerlines, homes & cars.

Anthony

Nice work guy's!
Great little story too :mrgreen:

A question about portable generators.

Do you hook it up to your house electric panel and run your whole house from it?

Or does it just have one power bar outlet to run a few things from?

ditto. On my way to the vancouver aquarium I had to walk from Georgia street because the buses weren't going into the park. I didnt even know parks closed! anyways, on the 10 minute walk I counted three trees that they had cut down just in case, but nine more that had just been blown right over; huge holes in the ground with roots sticking up all over. I didnt even bother counting the big branches that had been ripped off.

hahaha anyones on the east coast must be having a good laugh at us.:lol:

I was over on the mainland yesterday and couldn't believe that the power was still out in Burnaby. J&L was out for 36 hours and the power had just come back online when we got there mid afternoon. The wind hit 170KM/H here! We live next to a large hospital here in Vic. and I'm pretty sure that is main reason that our power didn't go out once the whole time. When I left for work Friday morning, the power was out all around us but we were fine :biggrin:.

As for connecting your generator to your house panel... DON'T! You are NOT allowed to backfeed your home with a generator if the power is out. I would hate to be a BC hydro linesman working on downed lines and hoping that no one is backfeeding their home. Just think.. you fire up the generator, plug it in to the house wiring, you forget to shut off the mains or don't connect something up correctly and all of sudden you've got 120VAC going out of your house. This voltage hits the transformer on the pole and BAM!... you've got something like 25,000VAC on the downed lines which some BC Hydro guy has in his hands. SCARY!

You can have a generator connected up to your house as a backup, but it has to be properly installed with a transfer switch that will guarantee complete isolation from the grid.

Agreed,

The generator runs outside the house. To it you hook up heavy gauge extension cords and run them into your house into a powerbar. Then run multiple items off that powerbar.

We had each of our main tanks hooked up. We were able to run the lights, heat, pumps and skimmers no problem, even hooked up the freezer and made a pot of coffee. *kisses generator* ;)