8:45 am - Saturday - November 14th - Seal Rock, OR - 46° F, 87% humidity, wind 9 mph out of the south.....heavy cloud cover with rain today with a forecast high of 51° F. On this date in 2013 we were in Lone Pine, CA watching the early morning sun hit Mt. Whitney......↴
Sometime between 4:30 and 5 am Friday the power went out, and it was a direct result of the high winds. A powerline just to the south of our site cleaved asunder, and suddenly half of SRRVC was plunged into total darkness. TLE touched my shoulder and said "the power went out". I managed to slip back into slumberland until a little after 7 am.....still no power. Since we did not know when the power was coming back I deployed our trusty Honda 2000 watt generator to repower the Newell, so I could turn on the Golf Channel to watch The Masters, and that is how we continued until 11:30 am when power was restored by the local power company....in fact, the break in the line was so close to our site we actually watched them repair it.....very cool. While we awaited the eventual repair of the line breach we ran our three Suburban gas furnaces, which kept the coach quite comfortable, as they always do.
I had forgotten to put away my flag, and flagpole Friday night in advance of the high winds, and I paid the price for it. I found my flagpole, and flag about 50' down the hill from our site, and the pole was broken in half.....doh! The solar light which sits upon the top of the pole to illuminate the flag at night was thrown about 60', and was broken in half.....it was an expensive mistake as the pole, and light will cost close to $150 to replace. In addition, the artificial turf had rolled up on itself. Everywhere there were broken branches, and twigs ripped from the trees which border our site between us and the ocean. The heavy step we use to get into the trailer was blown across the site into the hedge, along with the awning matt.....what a mess.
It rained all day Friday, sometimes quite hard, but it did not matter as TLE and I were firmly ensconced in our recliners watching The Masters stroke by stroke, hole by hole. Warm, cozy, and dry.......what a day, what a life!
In hindsight, it was probably a good thing we lost power because we were forced to do two things we sometimes neglect.....exercise our Honda generator, and run our gas Suburban furnaces. It is a wise thing to exercise your various systems on a somewhat regular basis to assure their proper function when they are needed. I had just exercised the Honda 2000 generator about 3 weeks ago for about an hour. It took me about 10 minutes to get it running back then, but Friday morning when I needed it to work quickly, it started on the second pull. I was able to plug in the coach, and get back inside out of the rain without getting drenched.
Thanks for stopping by!
Do you have an on-board gennie, or was that removed some time in the past?
ReplyDeleteMy Onan is way too loud, but works when needed..
Lotsa snow up here, Cascade concrete..wet..Yuck!
We do have an onboard Kohler 7.5 kw generator (propane), which works well, but it consumes 1/2 gallon of propane an hour. Since we only needed enough power to run the basic coach systems we used the Honda 2000, which will go 6 hours on a gallon of gas....a much more efficient use of resources.
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