Great model railraoding weather here just outside Ft wayne Indiana in the countryside.
It’s just about - 4 degrees out tonight, power has been out since 12:35 PM local time,( it is now about 9:08 PM, almost 9 hours with no power in sub zero weather! Not good! But I have a 10KW genpak with automatic controls hooked up to my house’s electrical system providing power and I have heat , and lights in my trainroom and lights to about half my house.
Microwave runs, well water pump runs, furnace works, and power to my barthroom, and to my trainroom,
TV room so I am doing fine. many neighbors laughed at me when I put the genpak in, saying to me that I’d probably never need it, our power company is great but I’ll bet they’re not laughing now!
The great ice storm of 2008 has left it’s toll well across the midwest.
Hope everyone is safe and sound and warm!
If any of you guys or gals ever thought about a backup generator, let me tell you something, it is one of the best home improvement investments I have ever made!
I’d hate to think what my trainroom would look like after a day or so with no heat at sub zero temperatures since a lot of my major pipes run just alongside and overhead of my traintables.
Mine is a 4 cylinder Briggs and Stratton engine, runs on natural gas, off my gas line, so fuel is never a problem.
It sure does give me peace of mind!
Kind of snowed in here in Minnesota as well, though our power is still coming over the wires. Working on scenery so I am watching paint dry at the moment. We use the generator in our motorhome when the power goes out.
Here in the middle of nowh…err Ohio, it’s kind of chilly (single digits I think) out as well. I have the woodburner going and have to open the window to keep from roasting. It’s nice tho as the furnace will not come on, saving the LP. I have a smaller generator (5500w) that I can put on the breakerbox, but it runs on gasoline. It was fine when I had my suburban with the 42gal tank that I could syphon from, but I gave that to my boy and now drive a big diesel. I was out on my property earlier and between the ice-storm and wind storm there sure are some ugly trees out there.
K4kid Its about just as cold over here just west in schereville, power is fine thankfully. Its so cold that the condensation on the inside of the windows is freezing [:-^]
Yes I have thought about and plan on one sometime in the near future, Hurricanes and ice storms have been known to take out the power for some for 2-4 weeks. I’ve been lucky so far, the longest I’ve been down is 2 days. Natural gas would be the ticket, it never stops flowing. I would probably get 25KW, it would need to run the AC in the summer, otherwise, you couldn’t stay in the house. Good for you for thinking ahead, have the neighbors dropped by with an extension cord?
42 degrees Celcius tonight with the wind chill. I heat my train room which is in an addition to my house (in the basement) via water heat supplied by an extra water heater and a small pump - even heat for what used to be a cold room. We still have power here - in fact we never (knock on frozen wood) have major power outages. Great weather to work on my many train projects. We also do not have very much snow this winter - just CCCCOOOLLLLD weather - for the last two weeks! Merry Christmas all from the great cold but not quite white north!
Extension cords?
Ohhhh man am I making some extra bucks renting them out tonight!! LOL!
Renting them by the foot! ha ha ha!
There are about 30 homes in this addition and we are way out in the country away from everything, closest town is Grabill, Indiana.
Only about 6 homes in here have generators like mine.
I have another piece of property at the enatranceto the addition and have mentioned to the home owners
association about leasing for a small fee a piece of ground to put in a big auxilliary generator to power the whole addition, and we can lease it, but they keep turning it down.
The power has now been off 12 1/2 hours and it is -4 degrees farenheit out right now.
24 homes with no heat for 12 hours now.
Imagine the broken water pipes and the costs to clean up and repair it all.
Seems to me the costs fof a community generator or even privately owned ones would be a lot less costly now.
When I bought mine, I checked with my homeowners insurance and they gave me a discount for installing it, saying the costs of pipe repairs or cleanup would be very expensive, if caused by a situation like we have now.
The problem here is the wind is now taking out many more ice covered tress, falling on power lines faster than repair crews can fix them with a new batch of freezing rain predicted for Wednesday and no temperatures above freezing before Friday .
on TV tonite, almost every business around here was announcing closings for Monday, because of no power, and very cold temperatures.
We really don’t have much snow, maybe 2 inches if that much, but a lot of ice, and now lots of wind!
Well, I’ll just stay in and work on my layout.
The powerline repair crews are earning their money for sure!
Out there all day and all night at minus 4 degrees and 30 mph winds, my hat is off to these guys!
4 here in Rochester, MN. Got close coupled Kadee couplers installed on a Roco/E&R FP7A, a decoder installed, and will get headight/MARS light installed on Monday morning. Time to go to bed!
Have a good nap!
I’m just setting here browsing around, trying to go to sleep!
Sipping on a glass of wine, kicked back, looking at layout projects, and loco
and freight car projects.
Cant sleep, so Im checking out the www. Its about 2deg F here in mid Missouri, windchill about -10. I live in a 110+year old house and when it gets this cold, the furnace works hard to keep everything cozy. I guess its caulking gun duty again, I can feel a cold breeze comming from inside the lower kitchen cabinets. I sure hope everyones alright. With all the bad weather, and power outages I dont see how people survive. Im taking a break from adding some Intermountain wheels and Kadee couplers to some reefers to build a couple Jordan vehicles. Yesterday, I repainted a 1940 Ford Pickup,(forgot who makes them) green with black fenders…looks pretty good.
Greetings and a MERRY CHRISTMAS from the middle of the froze up great lakes basin…The mock up for the mill confirmed that I was on the right track(no pun intended) as regards space. I am on the hunt for grainboxes with hatches on the roof so there is the grumbling to be put up with. I too am having a genset although not as big as some here. I cannot see much through the frosted windows…[:-^]
Here in northern NJ it’s only gotten down to +20F, but a reminder - - - -
REMINDER!!! IF YOU RUN A GENERATOR, NEVER RUN IT INSIDE AN ATTACHED GARAGE, OR ANYWHERE WHERE WIND CAN BLOW EXHAUST NEAR THE HOUSE - CARBONMONIXIDE KILLS WITHOUT ODOR OR WARNING!! PLEASE BE SAFE, AND MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE!!
Mine is outside, sets about 3 feet away from the backside of the house and the exhaust points out towards the backyard about another 4 feet away so the exhaust pipe is about seven feet from the house.
It sets on a about a 12 inch thick gravel base., with a special plastic base on top of the gravel that came with it.
Mine is a 10 KW genpak, not real big, but it gets the job done.
8 degrees F. here in Tn. last night! (thought this was the South???[%-)]) NOT good for my layout. The heaters in the building can’t keep up with that kind of cold. I can only manage about about a 25 degree temp. rise over the outside air. Looking at a couple of 220v heaters that would work, but they’re not in the budget right now.
I’ve had to do the generator thing twice this year. Once when the tornado hit and the other night we had an ice storm. Got a Coleman Powermate 5500 watt. It can run just about everything except the oven and cloths dryer.
Hey, K4. Glad to hear how your planning has paid off. Had no problems here in Indy, though the in-laws were getting ready to come down to our warm house from their dark Monticello home when their power finally came back.
It’s perfect weather to be holed up in the man-cave working on trains, but with Christmas only 3 days away, who has time for anything??
The next town over had several no-power days after the ice storm last week. Ours didn’t miss a cycle. It started snowing here last Friday about noontime, and the snow continued almost without a break until sometime Sunday evening. I was at my LHS a few days ago, and he said he lost power both at home and at the shop.
I just stayed home. I have use-it-or-lose-it vacation time to burn, so that’s worked out well this year. Instead, I continued working on Moose Bay. I had to remove some foam and prepare a base for the large water area. It’s pretty labor-intensive, so I was glad to have a lot of time on my hands. My one regret is not going out to our little girl’s sandbox to get some sand for the beach areas around the bay. (She turns 18 this week. She won’t miss a cup of sand after all these years.) Unfortunately, there’s about a foot and a half of snow on top now, and I might have trouble even finding the sandbox.
We got ourselves a 7KW Honda generator right before Hurricane Isobel hit, in Sept. 2003. Good thing, too – our basement sump pump needs electricity to run; without power from the generator, we’d have been flooded! We can do most everything with it except for using the oven or hot water heater. [If we want hot water for bathing, we need to turn everything else off for awhile until it heats up.]
I mentioned the possibility of bringing the generator and a few layout modules so I could run some trains during a family camping trip, but my wife didn’t share my enthusiasm for that idea[:-^]
Sounds like you’re all set. Good time to cocoon in the train room.
Yes, a back up generator is a must have item as far as I’m concerned. An ice storm during Christmas week about four years ago knocked out my power for almost 5 days, and I was one of the lucky ones. Some folks were without power for two weeks! I went through my whole winter’s worth of firewood in about 2 1/2 days, then switched to a small propane camp heater which lasted about 12 hours. By evening of the fourth day, my indoor temperature had dropped to 35 degrees. I was sleeping in the basement because it was actually about 10 degrees warmer. I finally called the power company’s hot line and found out it could be another week before I got power. I knew I wouldn’t find any generators anywhere in the area so I hopped in the truck and headed east determined not to turn back until I found a generator, even if I had to go to Maine to get one. My search ended in eastern Ohio where I picked up a 3500W portable. I got back home about five minutes after the power had come back on. I figured that out because a couple of my digital clocks which reset to 12:00 when the power came on were at 12:05.
The portable generator won’t power the whole house but will run a space heater, a lamp, my TV, and a microwave so it will at least allow me to survive the next extended outage. I can run power down to the train room if I’m so inclined. Never again will I get caught without a power source.
Generators are a good thing, I farm and have a generator that’ll run basically anything on the place, welder, stove, farrowing building exhaust fans. I needed it for 9 days last Jan after an ice storm. Had the tractor plugged in for the storm a couple days ago. Luckily haven’t needed it yet. nock on wood 4 month old daughter wouldn’t like the -12 temps last night with -40 ish wind chill. Though diesel for the tractor running it isn’t exactly cheap but it could be worse.
Ice storms came in early Thursday nite, and continued through Friday morning here in central Illinois. Everything looked like a glaze dounut! Everything was fine until about 9:00 a.m., then our 100 year old oak tree decided to drop a large limb that went through our roof with a hole about the size of golf cart! Then to top it all off, the power went our soon after do to downed power lines.
My 6500w generator was a blessing, kept the heat going and came in handy for power tools when I fixed the roof good enough to keep the weather out and wait for the call back from the insurance company. Kept the furnace running for the past few days until the power was restored, I spent my time working on track laying and one structure.
Looks like we have another storm coming in soon, so I guess I’m ready for the next one.