FINAL UPDATE: We finally got our power back on last night! That said, there are still thousands here that have not! PSEG is an incompetent organization IMHO!


THIRD UPDATE: 5pm 08/09 Not only isn't our power back, but they told me they can't figure out why! They are now saying Monday or Tuesday - man these guys are incompetent! They keep telling us we have no outage - I guess my entire neighborhood is wrong.


SECOND UPDATE: (08/08) It is now Saturday morning and the new update from PSEG to get power restored is late Sunday/early Monday! Emergency workers from out of State have told me they have never seen a power grid in greater disrepair/neglect and BTW we pay about the highest rates in the Country. So who will be held responsible you might ask - - NOBODY!


UPDATE 08/06 Well it's Thursday and still no power! PSEG is now saying Sunday morning for power restoration. All I can say is TG for our Generac! Wouldn't want my ice cream to melt! Still have not had the downed trees cut up and removed. the Town has been overwhelmed and all they have been able to do so far is to push them onto the curbs so that traffic can pass. Actual cutting and removal will be in the weeks to come.

We got hit about 1:30pm this afternoon and the storm lasted for about 3 hours. We lost two huge trees, had another two loose some big limbs and no one has power that I am aware of. Thankfully one of the trees barely missed my daughters car and no damage to house or pool. The pool however is a disaster and will take me a day or two to clean out. My neighborhood looks like a tornado hit us - but it wasn't a tornado - just incredibly strong winds and with very little rain for 2 months, the dry trees cracked like chopsticks!

Thankfully I have a huge generator and my house is running like normal - but many are in the dark. Tomorrow will be the big clean up. Here are some pictures.

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That was the craziest storm I've ever saw.

It came right up the coast about 80 to 100 miles off shore, and all the rain and wind stayed east of me.

Had a few minute shower on Sunday.

Be safe cleaning up.

we've been on generator for about 8 hours now.

Isaiha? North Carolina?

Isaiha yes, but on Long Island.

Power Co. says we will not get our power back until Thursday or Friday - but our Generac is doing its job!

Lotsa tree damage at my kid's homes on LI, limbs landed on my son's roof and deck, but no major damage. Eldest daughter had to leave her vehicle and walk home when it got cut off by downed trees and power lines.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

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Slava Ukraini!

Makes me sick to see trees like that gone, in such a beautiful neighborhood too. I am glad to see the heavy equipment, that makes clean up so much safer and easier.

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Possum—The other white meat!

We had an earth quake a couple months ago. No damage reported. As a 3rd generation native we are used to a shake now & then.

We had a tornado warning, with radar indicating a tornado near Ledgedale , Wayne County. I don't think that happened. But parts of Wayne and Pike Counties reported over 6 inches of rain. Honesdale got hit pretty hard. I had a small - medium sized tree come down in my backyard, but no damage to the house or garage. Very fortunate that was all.

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BTDT, Got The T-Shirt

I’m glad to hear you and your family made it through unscathed. Tree’s can be replaced and pools can be cleaned. I’ll bet you’re glad you have a generator!

I hope our other east coast members survived the storm as well as you.

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"I also cook."

I was away from home but tornadoes (sparked by the storm) went across my area. Got home the next day to no power but got it back around 1845hrs last night. We're used to hurricanes down here. Fortunately had no damage at my place. Sad when a hurricane is the most normal thing to happen in 2020!

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Support Israel!

Here in Central NJ in our town power went out about 1230. Several big limbs came off a tree in our courtyard-which the kiddies quickly converted to a play area. One neighbor saw a news item warning we might not get power back until Thursday morning, but it came back on at 1930.

Things aren't great here, power out almost twenty hours now. Trees are down branches are everywhere. Its a good mess all around. The main areas are ok, stores have power, and you can buy gas. Unlike Sandy storm where nothing had power...


Heres what is just down the street.


Hopefully, we get power back in a few days.

We had trees and limbs down but not much rain, glad we didnt loose power.

Sent from my LGL52VL using Tapatalk

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Don

northern central Jersey two blocks from Raritan river never lost power but lots of branches , trees , + wires down -

Two of my children (ages 35 &37) live in the Vineland region of New Jerseystan. The one west of Vineland lost power about when everyone else did. The wife and babies went to her parents about 5:00, my son is batching it in his work shop with a generator running the 'fridge full of beer and a widow A/C.

My daughter lives closer to the coast, about 20 miles west of Atlantic City Their power is still out. They are avid trailer campers, so two generators were pulled out. One to keep the house Refrigerator and freezer cold, the other to power up the Holiday Inn on wheels! The almost 10 year old triplets are having a field day!
They live on the Northeast edge of the "Pine Barrens" National Preserve. The number of protected dead trees will make getting power restored take some time! The local towns are used to loosing power for a few days every time a hurricane or TS comes through! In fact, the local volunteer fire department tries to pass out bags of ice, but almost 90% of houses have a back-up system of some sort. The low income and apartment dwellers do get well cared for! (the fire house has 3 commercial ice machines, and can make up to 3 tons of ice a day!)

A third son (the oldest, 41) lives outside Philly and came home in time to rip the carpet out of the basement. The flooding was only 3/4 inch deep, just enough to soak everything down there. No indication of any power outage. Just more rain than the sewers and drains were designed for. He bought the 34 year old house about 2 years ago, and there was no indication that this had ever happened before!

I hope this won't interfere with the whole family campout in 3 weeks!

Ivan

Chief,
And all others , hope you fully recover from this mess of a storm.
I think NH dodged a bullet. Early forecasts called for a path closer to NH but it tracked west. We had some rain and 30-40 mph winds but no outage or damage.
Good Luck
Jim

You make me glad I got my Generac generator for the house.

Randy The best insurance one can buy. I lost power about every three months for a day or so. Got a whole house generator and the power has never gone out again! Only work generator gets is it’s weekly start up.

It’s sort of like I heard from Woodrow on Lonesome Dove (about having a hog leg)—-it’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it!

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Possum—The other white meat!

We just got our power back after 36 hours .
Luckily the generator kept the refridgerator's and freezer's and some basic light's going.
Ct. had over 700,000 out of power. Lots of tree's down we got lucky and just had small branches and lot's of leave's down I got most of it cleaned up yesterday.

We had 100,000 people out of power, we were lucky we didnt loose ours.

Sent from my LGL52VL using Tapatalk

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Don

We’ve had a generator of some sort, starting with a small gasoline portable to a whole house propane, since moving to “upstate” NY in 1995. They were used often as the area was heavily wooded.

Then we moved in early 2016.
When asked what features we wanted in our yet to be built house in N.C., we said “ a whole house generator”.
The builder looked at us sideways and said, “ no one has them here”. Well, “we’ll be the first ones then”.

Just talked with my electrician a few days ago, they put in 9 generators in the past week and said they can’t keep up with demand.

Three and a half years and I haven’t used it but once for 10 minutes. I could care less, it’s there for just in case. This one is natural gas so no need to get out of my chair.
I would never not have one. YMMV

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Sure you did

We haven't had any really bad storms here in a few years but I'm pretty well prepared for any power outage. Between my generator and solar array I produce about 15kw when the sun is shining and about 7kw at night.

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SWHF #595

I don't think the weather forecasters expected things to get nearly so bad here in Southeastern MA, but we got slammed very hard here Tuesday late afternoon and just got our power back last night... roughly 26 hours or so without power in our neighborhood.

Fortunately for us, neither my wife or I was home when the worst of it hit. She was at work and I was driving home from Western MA and... while it was raining and windy... it was nothing like what I found when I got home. I looked at the radar history and HOLY COW!!! Guess I am lucky that our house is still standing! Mama Mia!!!

We lost no big trees near the house, but there were leaves and branches everywhere. Some neighbors weren't so lucky.

Thank God for our little 3,500 watt Chinese generator. We didn't put it on at first because we had no concept of the extent of the damage. The power company misled us (as usual) and made us believe that we'd have power return sooner rather than later. Nope. Didn't work out that way.

Finally, we got some good information that we'd be out for quite a while, so out came the generator and we started to power the refrigerators again. Thank God, no food spoiled... although the ice maker froze up solid and broke the auger. Damn!

We were very happy when power came back on. I use a Bi-Pap machine to sleep and being without it for one night was a horror show. Next time, the generator comes out right away no matter what the power company tells us.

Where we live now, smallish 110v gasoline generators make the most sense. Portable, easy to handle, sips fuel and just fine for limited essential uses. But once we move to our retirement property it will be a whole 'nother story. For starters, we will be on well water, so 110v is out the door and hello 220v.

Since we are building from scratch, it made sense to divide our electric uses into an essential power bus and a non-essential bus so we can power one and not the other during power outages. We'd need a monster-sized generator if we wanted to power everything during a power outage.

But it still leaves the question of large portable vs. permanently-installed... and we were somewhat forced into a decision to go with a large portable generator, the main reason being that there is no good, safe, unobtrusive place to install a permanent generator around our house.

We may change our thinking in the future. I guess it will all depend on how things work out during the first 1-3 years. Lord knows we aren't getting any younger and the good wife may someday end up demanding something that is fully automatic vs. manual.

The main reasons for my first 5500w portable generator. Well water, oil burner for heat.
No power, no running water. No potty or hot showers.

There’s all sorts of rules for placement of standby power. Windows nearby, heat sources, any type of house vents, etc.

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Sure you did

Yeah, and none of them seemed to work out well for our property and house layout. We had a difficult enough time locating our heat pump and our propane tank & piping. Two companies told us that the latter was impossible before we found a third company that came up with a workable, legal solution. Welcome to Massachusetts!

Proper (legal) venting and finding an unobtrusive spot free from potential flooding did us in on the permanent generator... at least for now.

Our hot water heater is a 110v heat pump-type, so running it on the essential power bus should not be a problem.

On the other hand, the main heating & cooling heat pump is too large for a portable generator to handle. If heating is needed, we revert back to the propane furnace. If we need air conditioning... well, too bad for us!

We had no spot to install our propane gen in NY that would meet code, so we put put it behind our shed, 50 feet from the house. The bonus was no noise whatsoever, though it cost us a lot more to run the electric line to the panel.

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Sure you did

Heres the outage map of my area, it aint pretty.


I don't have a whole house gen, I do have natural gas but no good place to put the unit. Gas comes in on one side of the house the electric on the other. The house is a strange design so its not easy to run lines through it. We could put it kinda right outside the front door, not exactly the welcome mat...

Here's what keeps the place going. Powers most everything but not the central AC or electric oven. We have two small window AC units and they keep a room or two livable. The problem with this is keeping a supply of gas. It burns 10 gal per day, I have enough cans to keep 40 gallons. In the past when gas was not available we were close to running out.

In areas close to the shore where flooding was a concern, they turned off the natural gas before the storm. Many people with NG generators were unhappy to say the least.



Yes, its locked and cabled to the trees, never had an issue and dont want one.

You will find if you ever want to sell your home that a whole-house generator is a tremendous help in resale. The couple that bought our former home did so because of the generator. They were looking at several homes with the same or similar features, neighborhoods, pricing, etc. but the generator carried the day.

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Possum—The other white meat!

Plenty of stories about people finding their gens going quiet during storms.
I even heard about some whole house units disappearing.
The portable ones were a whole lot easier though unless chained to something.

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Sure you did

Ahhh!!! Sneaky!!!

We actually thought about something similar except that we don't currently have any shed or out building. We were thinking of pouring a raised slab down behind the house and fencing it in... the idea being to get it up and out of any flood potential and away from our windows (that legal venting issue again!). Yes, I know they have their own weather covers, but somehow hiding it with a fence seemed more appropriate.

Then, of course, there was the fuel issue: Gasoline or diesel or run a propane line way out back? Or possibly a separate propane tank? That's when a portable started to sound really good.

Oh yeah! They warn you around here: Don't leave your generator on all night because it won't be there in the morning.

I recently considered buying a small inverter type just for all-night use because of my need for a Bi-Pap machine.

So when the Bi-Pap machine stops Bi-Papping, you'll know when your little portable has been stolen.

Have a couple propane tanks installed where the generator is located. I had two 110 gallons if I remember correctly. The code in NY was, I think, 15ft from the unit. Like I said, cost extra to run the electric to the house.
Usually the propane trucks still roll during/after storms, just monitor the tank and call well in advance of running out.

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Sure you did

Several years back I come rolling in to work on Monday morning after a 3 day ice storm. I am walking by the back to get in the employee entrance and thought something seemed funny, by could not lay my finger on it.

It is ice cold in the office when I open the door. I go the thermostat, it is blinking. I go back outside, BOTH brand-new, enormous commercial heating and cooling units are GONE!

I call heating and air company and police department. Officer beats the heating and air man here, because he is a block away investigating the twenty-seventh call they had received of the units being stolen! (Including from the top of a three story building!).

Multi-state theft ring going from city to city. I actually had an FBI agent come by that was trying to track them. He told me they were professional heating and air people probably tied up in a gang working off drug debts.

My heating and air men said they could not have done a better job disconnecting/carting off the units.

Insurance paid for new units, getting them in cages, and getting a vacuum alarm set (when they depressurize it sets of an alarm that rattles windows a mile away).

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Possum—The other white meat!

Soooooo dirty pool and the Generac kicked in....sounds like rich folks problems
Seriously though, looks like you dodged a bullet as far as you are concerned. Loves me some Generac!!! What snapped those trees off like that?? never seen that before.
Worst part about the hurricane aftermath when power is out is the oppressive heat, humidity and skeeters.....while you are outside with the chainsaw clearing stuff cause if you want for the city you'll be there next year
Oh and DO NOT FORGET the two stroke oil along with the gas stockpiles.
COme to think of it, I just might stop off at the tractor dealership this afternoon and replace my Stihl 170-I got a feeling that we are due for one this year that will necessitate clearing some tree limbs from the old Pecan tree along the back fence. Over the years it has broken off enough pieces that it isn't tall enough to reach the house which is the only reason I have left it standing (that and because I'm a cheap ******* )

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Forum consigliere

I like the way you think

Whole house on wheels!!

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SWCA #2306
DAV in honor of POP

How much gas does that burn a day?

That’s a big un

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Sure you did

A whole lot.

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Sure you did

I have a Made in the USA Coleman Powermate about 20/25 years old. I had a 5kw with a 7/8 gallon tank that would go 4 hours before refueling, this one is 4kw and has a 5 gallon tank. It will run in the 26-28 hour area depending on what all is hooked up.

I do like being able to take it other places, I don't like the noise (looking at other muffler systems!)

The first generator anyone in our family bought was a 3500watt import from a "Discounter" in 1975. Service was not available, and it became junk in about 10 years of little use. Then I bought the 5 KW Coleman, it suffers from typical nonuse issues, but I could get worked on just about any small engine shop or dynamo repair. The small gas tank was an issue , so I bought my brothers 4 KW for $25. For a long time I had the two, and everyone called me in their time of need. Idiots, in fact double idiots! They mow their own grass, but put the wrong fuel in a plainly marked GAS tank, never checked the oil even though I provided it. They destroyed my 5KW! My 4KW is still going strong and has never been and will never be loaned out!

I have a 110v gas furnace. I have installed a plug and socket on the power line to it, so in time of need, I can plug it in to a cord and it will fire up!

When ever we went without power for a long time (11.5 days 12/25 to 1-4/2004; 4 days 9/2008; 6 days 10/2010) we did our cooking a Coleman camp stove that I set up for propane and Colman fuel (or grilled outside with propane.) In that time frame we belonged to a gym with many locations, we did our showering there, and my apartment complex had a Laundry Mat (free to me!)

Ivan

I was working a side gig for an electrician doing a job in Bedford NY many years back. Now, that’s where the rich folk live, think Soros, Nelson Peltz, Martha Stewart, Ralph Lauren, etc. Billionaireland. Helipads on their property.

The crew put in a generator run by a 427 Chevy V8 engine. The house belonged to some muckity muck from Deutche Bank.

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Sure you did

Yikes!!!!!!

"The most powerful portable generator on the market is an exceptional value. Powerful enough to start many 5-ton air conditioning units and can provide power for up to 16 circuits."

Looks like that monster would even run my 5-ton heat pump!

Always seems to work for me.....

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Keep on Chooglin'

WE have our generator on wheels does the whole house. After storm we wheel it out and away we go. The reason why we wheel ours out of the garage if it was mounted outside we always worried that flying debris would damage unit.

Back in April of 2014, a sudden ice storm knocked out all power for 5 days in our wooded area just West of Philly. Now I was in Eilat for Uncle Sam when I received an email from a "mad and cold wife". Well our temperature was >35 C, blue skies and sun; wife -5 C and cold. When I made it home with a suntan, SWMBO had already contacted the Kohler dealer and the generator was being installed in a week. Glad I "trained her" to look for the best one mechanically!! So now any time the power goes out (as happened earlier in the week) we are the ones with full freezers from our neighbors "stashes" Amazing how ice cream seems to be the major consumable brought over by my wife's friends!! Dave_n

Being disabled sorks on a good day. I'm glad I taught my wife how to hook up our now old HONDA 6500 out in the shop. Fortunate to have power restored in a little more than 24 hours. A lot of others will be days getting restored.
We have to alternate certain loads but can even run the heat pump AC.

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NRA LIFE
Reserve Officer 9yrs

FROM THE SPECS.
"With a run time of around 11 hours at 50% load, the GP17500E has one of the highest run times, compared to its similarly powerful peers." With an estimated gasoline consumption of 1.6 GPH (gallon per hour) at 50% load, this generator is among the most fuel efficient of the products in the above-mentioned wattage range.

It has an 18 gallon tank

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SWCA #2306
DAV in honor of POP

My ancient Honda 6500 Generator, Model EB6500SXA.
Fuel Capacity: 6.2 gallons Fuel consumption up to 10 hours.
Our experience .9-1 gal per hour.
Wife runs it monthly to keep the fuel from glogging the carburetor.
It came with a huge battery on it. My last replacement was a generic lawn tractor battery, plenty for a 1 cylinder Honda.

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NRA LIFE
Reserve Officer 9yrs

08/08 status update on OP #1

I was unaware that they actually make a portable generator that went up to 17,500 watts! That's huge! That is about the size of many Generac Standby Units and if you don't want to incur the expense of having a whole house unit purchased & installed, gas plumbed, wired up, slab poured, inspected and taxed as a permanent structure, that is a very viable alternative!

Yes - you do have to quench its thirst with gasoline but in an emergency (assuming gasoline is available) that's a small price to pay. You could also convert it (with the use of a special conversion kit) to run on natural gas or propane. With Natural Gas more than likely you would need to increase the diameter of the supply pipe to compensate for the very low pressureNG flows at - to adequately supply the generator.