monophoto
Member
Wife and I built a new home - have been in it fo 15 1/2 years. It's in a quasi-rural area - fairly dense suburban developments surrounded by farmland. One of the first things we noticed after moving was that the reliability of electricity service wasn't as good as in our old neighborhood which was purely a classic suburban bedroom community.
Over time, the local utility has reinforced their system as the residential density has increased. So as a result, the frequency of service outages has diminished pretty dramatically.
Two weeks ago, we had an outage for about two hours (caused, I believe, by an accident associated with a road construction project). Not a big deal. And this was the first outage that lasted more than a few minutes in at least a year.
Last night, we had a second event caused by a line of thunderstorms that came through around 8pm. The outage lasted until noon today.
Some of our neighbors have opted to install automatic natural-gas powered emergency generators, while a few have chosen to use gasoline powered generators that have to be set up each time they are needed.
Wife is convinced that we need a generator. Her main issue is that we are at the end of the street, which is also at the bottom of a hill, so we have to have a 'grinder pump' to deal with sewage - and when there is a power outage, we are limited to flushing the toilet about 40 times before we have a serious problem. I'm not convinced - the frequency of events is diminishing as the utility improves their service, the only place to put a generator would be right outside our bedroom window (did I mention they are noisy?), and the cost is significant. And there is a McDonald's not too far away with bathrooms.
Who is going to win this debate?
Over time, the local utility has reinforced their system as the residential density has increased. So as a result, the frequency of service outages has diminished pretty dramatically.
Two weeks ago, we had an outage for about two hours (caused, I believe, by an accident associated with a road construction project). Not a big deal. And this was the first outage that lasted more than a few minutes in at least a year.
Last night, we had a second event caused by a line of thunderstorms that came through around 8pm. The outage lasted until noon today.
Some of our neighbors have opted to install automatic natural-gas powered emergency generators, while a few have chosen to use gasoline powered generators that have to be set up each time they are needed.
Wife is convinced that we need a generator. Her main issue is that we are at the end of the street, which is also at the bottom of a hill, so we have to have a 'grinder pump' to deal with sewage - and when there is a power outage, we are limited to flushing the toilet about 40 times before we have a serious problem. I'm not convinced - the frequency of events is diminishing as the utility improves their service, the only place to put a generator would be right outside our bedroom window (did I mention they are noisy?), and the cost is significant. And there is a McDonald's not too far away with bathrooms.
Who is going to win this debate?