Woke up to snow again, but we're warm enough during the day that it just keeps melting off.
Guess what? I don't have any more staining to do! DH has done the painting and staining on his wood work table himself. He came in last night and said he just stained the whole table himself. Ok! Works for me haha :) This is one of the drawers he made that pulls out and there's one on the other side of the table, too. He also plans to make a smaller drawer next to it. Nothing fancy at all - but very sturdy and functional. He just painted it black because he had some old paint to use up, LOL. He was going to stain them, but the fancy plywood veneer was already peeling off, so he just decided to use paint. He was a bit miffed that he spent good money for that good plywood and it was like that. We had used that when he built our closets out and the plywood didn't do that and it stained nicely.
Other than just getting a whole house generator (maybe one day) I think we are fairly well prepared when the power goes out. We do have an old propane bbq grill and it also has a side burner, which is handy for like heating a pan of soup or can use a small frying pan on it. We have 3 big coolers (one is a Yeti) that we can move food into, to try to keep cold. We have car phone chargers as well as a solar one. We have these little LED lanterns that pop up and emit a ton of light and keep them in several spots throughout the house. One little lantern can light up a room pretty well. We have about half a dozen 5 gallon jugs of water stored out in the shop (we lose water when our power goes out) - mostly to just be able to flush the toilet. Thankfully we don't have to deal with tornadoes and hurricanes here.
And honestly, a whole house generator (ours would run on propane) would not be very efficient if the power was out for days. Apparently they use 2-3 gallons of propane per hour, so our 1000 gallon propane tank, which can really only hold 800 gallons, wouldn't last too long and that would be an expensive week! Just don't really think it's worth the cost of a generator, when I think the longest we've ever been without power is like 12 hours and most times it's just a few hours.
DD and SIL are getting their land ready to build. The trees that needed to come down (a lot! because the whole 5 acres is trees) are cut and taken away (some will be used for building things) and last Friday the equipment showed up to start dozing and excavating. So exciting :)
I am glad your friend is ok and this has opened her eyes to build a little safety net of items for her safety!
ReplyDeleteyes, I'm glad she is ok and checked on her this morning to see if her power got back on and we chatted a bit about being more prepared.
Delete34 people died from those storms. My prayers..
ReplyDeleteI can’t remember, do you have a standby generator? We have a whole house generator. Every Wednesday morning it kicks on and runs through its check. They DO use a lot of propane. The first autumn in this house we had a four day power outage, and the tank was just above 40% at the beginning of that outage. By the second day, I asked our neighbor to come over and show us how to manually shut the generator off and on again. (I knew they were doing it because I wouldn’t hear theirs at night.) There is no point to have it run at night. He was happy to, (because I am sure he didn’t want to hear it churn all night). The kid who watched went out at 10p.m.. to shut it off , and DH, who is an early bird, turned it on when he woke up. The distributor came to fill the tank the day after power was restored, and we had gone down to just over 5%, and that was with shutting it off at night. That said, we love it because we have a private well and septic As you know, if the power goes out with a private well, you don’t have water because there is no power to the pump!
The washer, dryer, and electric heat and oven are not on the panel the standby generator is wired too. The heating system does have an “emergency heat mode which switches to propane, and is powered by the generator. But, we use the woodstove for heat in power outages. As for cooking , my range is dual fuel, so I can use the cooktop. Mostly though, I use a crock pot in power outages. If we didn’t need it for water* (our farm didn’t have a standby generator) I am not sure I would put one in. As you know, it doesn’t get extremely hot or cold here, and if it is cold, we have the woodstove. We DID have one in Florida because of the heat…I think in THAT case, had we needed it, I would have run it at night to sleep, but not for the day.
*For those who don’t know, it’s not just drinking water I refer to. If you have a well and septic system, you can’t flush the toilet if the power goes out. You CAN “force” a flush by pouring a gallon of water in the toilet, but the pump from the septic to the leech field will not run. That’s fine if you have maybe two or three people …if it’s yellow, let it mellow….but not a houseful of people filling every bedroom of a four bedroom septic. After our first windstorm there, the power came oon and the septic alarm sounded warning us the tank level was high! We then implemented a power outage “one toilet, one flush, once a day” rule. That said, I am glad I have a standby generator, but in this part of the country I don’t think not having one would a deal breaker. AND,, this reminds me, I need to have kid show me how to manually shut it off.
-Meg B.
We do have a gasoline powered stand-alone generator and that has been used in a pinch to hook up a few things. Very true about the water for toilets - with the septic not pumping, you do have to not over do it! Good to know about how to minimize the propane use, if we ever got a whole house generator.
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