Guitar Gear Forum

We've been having power outages. We're in really uncertain times and I foresee several things that we're used to and take for granted not being as reliable as they once were for the next several months. I recently bought an extra 4 cubic foot freezer box to store extra food in the garage... so you can imagine how unhappy I am at the prospect of power outages ruining all the food in my refrigerator and freezer.

So I did a thing and bought a generator. It's not a full auxiliary power generator for the whole house, but it will keep our food fresh and maybe keep our internet connection alive in an outage... providing cable service doesn't go down with the power. It shouldn't...

Preparing for life in the post-pandemic apocalypse.

Power outages are somewhat normal here during the heavy rain season (April - June). Even before the virus. If anything this year has been a bit better than the previous one. I thought about getting a generator but haven't really looked into it yet. I am in a mountain area here and there is a lot of wildlife so being in pitch black darkness might not be the best idea.

It flickered here but where I work in Culver City it went black last week for a few hrs . But we've been lucky and it hasn't been too bad .

We had some short ones over the weekend in the Seattle area. Fires are on the other side of the mountains from us but the smoke is insane.

We've definitely had more outages than would be considered normal. Not just during the pandemic, but over the last 2+ years. I have no proof, but I think the city I live in is forgoing infrastructure investments and repair to minimize expense. Sadly, our local government has a long history of mismanaging core services... I have good UPS's that cover my Telco rack, A/V systems and recording desk, so I'm covered for short "blips". Like the OP, I have a hefty investment in frozen foods and UPS's aren't going to cover that. I've threatened for years to get a whole-house generator and I'm at the point where I want to pull the trigger. My house is small so I could probably do it for ~$6K, including an ATS. The only thing stopping me is that we need to make some room additions and we'd need to relocate the NG line. I'd like to avoid paying twice for the plumbing work. On a related note, it would be great if contractors would actually call you back...

I think we have only had (1) power outage in the 3-3/4 years I have lived in this house - and it was storm related.

on a related note (to CA) - I heard people there that have Tesla's are able to use the car to keep the house going during the rolling blackouts.
but my question is - once the state goes even more green - and Tesla's continue to increase in popularity - all that home charging of those cars is only going to stress the grid even more.

Good luck out there!