Kawi2strokes.com Forum

She's THE bitch and it's Ms. Bitch to us.

I'm 90 miles from the eye of Hurricane Irene when it passed over New York City. My power has been out since Noon and I'm running off generator power. Met Ed says it might be a couple of days before my power is restored. The cable TV system is running off of battery backup for my area and that's already gone an hour beyond design, so I figure that I'll lose TV and internet any time now. At least I didn't lose any trees on my property. A couple of branches fell, but no major damage in my sub-division...one neighbor lost a tree and it took out his fence. Several roads in the area are closed due to flooding or downed trees.

Yesterday, I brought a 1200 watt generator to my parents in New Jersey. It's enough to run their fridge or sump pump. They're 35 miles west of NYC. Their power didn't even blink. I'm 55 miles further west, and I won't see commercial power for at least 2 days.... go figure.

Anyway, I'll pretty much be out of Internet for a couple of days, so if I don't reply to an email right away...I'll get to it when power is restored.

Sorry to hear that Jeff. We didn't really get it bad on the other side of the mountain. Some localized flooding and a couple of trees down here and there, but we didn't lose power. ESU must have power and be full up and running, fall classes start as scheduled tommorow.

I was doing some screen saves of weather.com radar for my area ( just south of Allentown,PA ).



Here's the last from 11:20 pm


The wind was blowing pretty good, guessing 40-50 mph and heavy rain.

Then about 1 am, the electric went out. My wife got me up at 2am to see the water coming in thru the basement walls on the eastern side of the house. ( due to the driving rain on that side of the house )

I brought up a group 27 deep cycle marine battery and our inverter so we could have coffee in the morning. Mary left for work at 6 am and it only took her an extra 15 minutes to get in ( she works at a hospital )

We finally got electric back at 7:55 pm. I guess a generator is on the list of things to buy.

JRD, looks like we're just about neighbors. map marker looks like it's pointing to coopersburg?

We didn't have power outtage, but I always have rain making its way into my outside basement doors.

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'72 H2 : Blue-ish.

Power came back on for me at about 3:00 pm yesterday, but there are still lots of power outages in the area. ESU had power, but 4 blocks down the hill, they didn't.

I was working until 10:15 last night fixing power problems in the cable system. Lots of blown fuses and putting out generators. We had a 1/2 crew working (normal on Mondays) and a couple of them didn't show up. There are a lot of trees down and a lot of roads are closed due to that, flooding, and bridge damage. Traffic is being re-routed a lot a few miles north of me. I was doing a lot of work in that area from about 5:00 on. Traffic was nuts but most people were courteous at the broken traffic lights, which was surprising to me considering the way people around here normally drive I did surprise me, though, at how stupid some people are. I'm working on the side of busy back roads in a bucket truck. People would pull up right next to my truck, in a curve, stop in the only lane of traffic and ask me for directions. I'm 25 ft off the ground and people holler up to me to find out how to get somewhere. If I had to tell them more than twice to move their car, they got the roundabout directions.

Sorry to hear about the water damage. A generator is definitely handy to have around here. I brought the one to my parents down in New Jersey and their power didn't even blink.

Water damage was just a pain in the ass, no serious damage. If we lost anything, it wasn't important anyway.

Question, ( we have comcast cable ) does the internet cable system rely on electric to work? I used my inverter to power up my computer and modem/router but it didn't work until the electric came back on.

The Cable TV/internet system requires commercial power (Met Ed, PPL, TVA, etc) to work. The amplifiers on the poles require between 60 and 90 volts AC to work. That voltage is provided by a power supply that is run off of the local utility and then converted to the proper voltage. There are 2 kinds of power supplies that cable TV runs off of...standard and standby. Standard power supplies are utility powered only. Commercial power goes away and the cable power supply quits and the system shuts down. Standby power supplies have a battery backup. These act like a UPS. If commercial power quits, the batteries power the system for a few hours. Depending on the system design, the batteries will last anywhere from 3-12 hours. In my case, the battery backup lasted 10 hours and I had TV until 10:00 pm Sunday. Frequently, we'll run generators on the power supplies if commercial power is out only in part of a cable node.

Funny thing is the when we have to run generators to keep the cable system running, the guy who goes around and gasses them up will occasionally find that a homeowner will run an extension cord out to our generator to keep their fridge going. When that happens, some of the guys (myself included) will knock on the door, hand the customer a gas can, and tell them to make sure that the generator stays gassed up. 95% of the time, the customer will keep the generator gassed up and we get back a full gas can. The other 5% of the time, we get back an empty gas can. Either way, everyone wins.

I would gladly gas up a generator to keep my freezers running.

Thanks for the explanation. That explains why we lost power after 1am and I had no internet at 6:30 am. ( I wanted to bid on a garmin gps that sold cheap )