The Hurricane Next Time

With each power outage, most spectacularly by the cain raised by two hurricanes in two years, we learn a little more about our house, and how incredibly vulnerable our domestic lifestyle is to disruption. Routine life literally hangs by a wire. Here are a few things we're considering for future power outages:

Emergency Radio
           We unfortunately ignored advice to get a battery-powered radio. A friend showed me an impressive-looking American Red Cross emergency radio, which has built-in LED flashlight, a solar panel and handcrank as backups to keep the radio and light going if the batteries run low, and several emergency weather channels in addition to regular AM/FM. The version I saw appears to be this FR360, but many different versions can be found on the internet. This Eton product supposedly gives 15 minutes of radio time for one minute of cranking, and can be used to recharge a cell phone.

Backup Lighting
         My daughter loves bringing out the candles during a power outage. For a bit more light, word has it that the local Rite-Aid pharmacy sells very inexpensive oil lamps (I haven't confirmed this, so it's worth calling ahead), which look attractive and actually put out a good light. A post I found on the internet points out, however, that a slender glass oil lamp can be easily knocked over, and that a less elegant but more stable version is the Dietz #90 lantern. Here are some images.

Land Line Phone
          Some insight here, but no particular solutions. Anyone with Verizon's FIOS internet and phone service will have by now discovered that, when Verizon replaces the old copper phone line with fiber-optics, more will change than the speed of your internet. The old copper line carried a little bit of energy with it to keep your land line phone working even when your power goes out. Fiber optics doesn't carry that energy, so instead they put a box in your basement with a backup battery that keeps your land line phone working for a day or two, after which your phone stops working. That box also draws a steady 20 watts of energy year-round adding a little bit to your baseline energy use. Fortunately, our ATT cellphones continued to work, though I hear some other wireless providers lost power.

Water Use
         During the massive power outage after Hurricane Sandy, both the water plant and the wastewater plant that serve Princeton struggled to keep going. The wastewater plant had to truck in 9000 gallons of fuel oil every day to run its backup generators, at a time when fallen trees were blocking roads and damaged transfer stations were squeezing fuel supplies.
         The best thing homeowners and businesses can do at such a time is to draw less water from the tap and send less wastewater down the sewers. Because so much energy is required to clean water (Princeton's annual production of wastewater takes well over a million dollars in electricity and natural gas to treat), higher efficiency toilets, shower nozzles, and faucet aerators can be thought of as energy-saving devices.
        It's also important to direct sump pump water to the yard (preferably a raingarden), or to the street, but not into the sanitary sewer.

Heating the House

        Just as everyone learned how gas stations can't pump gas without electricity, most gas appliances in the house were also rendered useless. It can come as a surprise just how much electricity a gas furnace or oven consumes. As they cycle on and off, some 600 watts of electricity is needed to heat up the little metal element that then ignites the natural gas. The furnace fan that circulates air through the house can take 500 watts. Though a typical water heater has a pilot light that allows it to function without electricity, I hear some models have fans that make them dependent on electrical power.
       During four days without power, and not wanting to plague the neighborhood with another noisy gas generator, I kept wondering whether there's some way to take advantage of the car's power. One option I've been told about, and plan to look into, is to buy something like the Duracel Powerpack 600, which is left plugged in so that it is well charged when a power outage comes along. It's essentially a big battery that can be adapted to plug into the furnace and run it for a half hour, after which the battery must be recharged via the cigarette lighter in the car. It doesn't have enough power to start a refrigerator and other appliances with a high start-up load.
          It's possible to hook the powerpack up to a solar panel, as in this product. Sounds like a first step, but there really should be some sort of backup system--a scaled up version of that Red Cross radio--with a sizable battery fed by a few solar panels, a bicycle-driven generator in the basement, and some way to tap the car's energy, that could keep critical home functions going during a power outage and even reduce our dependency on the grid year-round.
       Until the future arrives, we were fortunate to have a wood stove that puts out a great deal of heat, keeping the house warm and also serving to heat water, cook popcorn, etc. Old technologies can be positively civilizing. Its radiant heat travels surprisingly well from room to room. Modern wood stoves have primary, secondary and tertiary combustion chambers, burning very cleanly if the wood is dry and well seasoned. Wood pellet stoves are even better, I hear, and lead to the thought of converting all those downed trees into pellets for wood stoves, so that we become less dependent on these troubled and troubling legacy energies--the underground sources that are feeding nature's fury above ground.

Note: A friend told me his next door neighbor helped him out with electricity from a natural gas generator that automatically starts up during power outages. It's a smaller version of what public schools and other institutions have. A NY Times article puts their base price at $4500. Nice, for a price, but still is just one more way to burn more of the fuels that are getting us into trouble.