2024 Blackout

We had a heck of a storm pop up out of nowhere and it generated a tornado that really kicked in my city’s teeth. At last count, the city says there’s been at over 400 power poles take down and about 80,000 people lost power, myself included. This was the first time that this had happened since we bought a generator with the money that Trump sent out during the covid lockdown. It’s a “dual fuel” generator and can take either gasoline (without ethanol!) or propane. The ethanol free stuff is getting harder and harder to find and I had three tanks of propane ready for the job, and what a job it did! I was very happy with how easy the setup was and how quickly it all came together, thought I opted to just carry it out instead of installing the wheel kit we had somewhere in the garage. I ran it for most of the day Friday, let it rest over night (because only bad neighbors run their generators at night), then ran it for another 6 or 7 hours Saturday. All and all I think I used about 2/3 of a single tank, which bodes well for future situations where I need to power a deep freezer, fridge, a single LED room light, and a whole charging setup for my phone as a hotspot, my laptop, and my kindle.

I got lucky this time because the tornado didn’t hit my house directly and the wind we did get didn’t bring down any of the pine trees that I’ve been worried about and plan on taking down once I have another day job. It was also in the 60’s after the sun went down, so I didn’t have to sleep through a stifling situation like the last time we went through a prolonged power outage.