Winter Weather and Power Outage

Well for those of you who live in the mid atlantic area, you are aware that we have experienced two large snow storms in the past week with nearly 3 feet of total snow. Well, the first storm was fine, some powdery snow a little wind, no big deal, but the second storm was wet snow that clung to trees and wind gusts of up to 40mph. Well, it started on Tuesday night and stopped about 12am last night. I was expecting the power to go out, but it didn't, until I thought I was in the clear and it went out last night at 10:30. I stayed up until 2am adding hot water bottles to keep the temp up and also stirred the water. I woke up at 8 this morning and continued. Luckily the temp stayed in the safe zone, it got down to about 74 degrees, but I had the tanks wrapped in towels which worked very well. Luckily we got power back at noon today, so it was about 10.5 hours without, everyone survived, although haven't seen my cleaner shrimp today, so I don't know what happened to him. Anyways, just wanted to describe my night.

 

Glad it all worked out, i'm just outside washington DC and managed to avoid any outages, but according to the news there where plenty in the area that were not so lucky.

 

thats great dedication guitarman. glad your hard work and care has paid off for you.

 

Good to hear you made it through.

Now you should factor in how much money and time you would of lost if power stayed off longer and see if that is about the same money a generator would cost. :-/

 

We do have a generator, but had no gas that night. I had to run out in the morning to get some then hooked my power head and heater up which lasted until the power came back on. Your right though, it's so much easier to spend the money on the generator and to have the peace of mind that it's there. I was also lucky in that we have a gas stove, that's how I heated the water up. If I had an electric range, I would have really been boned.

 

That is why I went with a LP generator because I never store very much fuel at the house. We have a 300g tank out back so it will last a while if power goes out. Everything in the tank seem to make it through all right now that it's been a couple days???

 

What about a simple UPS for the heater and powerhead to make it through the short periods without electricity and a generator to backup the whole system when you know it won't be coming back for a while?

 

that's actually what i have. i normally keep my ato and auto doser pumps plugged into it so power interruptions (like a flicker not an outage) don't reset them or anything. but when i do loser power, i unplug those and plug in the heater and a single PH. i've tested it to run at least 4 hours (at which point i got tired of the beeping).

glad to hear this worked out for you GM. Good thinking on what you did do. Nice experience story. +K

 

Yea, everyone is doing fine and the corals are all normal. However, I haven't seen my cleaner shrimp in a few days. I dont' know though when he went missing. He usually hangs out under the same rock every day, but he's not there. He may have died, don't know though.

 

What is a UPS?