Where's George?

[Steve Branam]

The video I've been seeing of Vermont on New England Cable News has been truly horrifying. Huge masses of brown, silty water raging through towns, taking out bridges, roads, and houses, in some cases completely cutting off towns from all outside access. Similarly in western MA, like Shelburne Falls. They ended up getting a fair amount of rain, and the mountains just funneled it all together. What are normally small streams turned into massive churning rivers.

I went through a similar flood of the Big Sandy River in eastern KY back in 1977, in the coal country hills next to West Virginia. In one day, the river overtopped its banks and rose so that we had 10 ft of water in our front yard. It took several days to recede. This floodwater was much slower than the water in Vermont, with much less destructive hydraulic force. It didn't do nearly so much structural damage. But it left a good 3 inch layer of very fine, stinking, silted mud over everything. This stuff was very slippery, so the first days of cleanup were slipping and sliding around in all this trying to push it out of the houses and off the roads and sidewalks.

I completely disassembled all our household appliances and cleaned them out and was able to get everything back to work. The most amazing one was our portable dishwater, which we had left unplugged and disconnected in the kitchen. When I disassembled the water pump, it was packed solid with mud. And of course everything took weeks to dry out, walls and furniture warping. The mud just turned to fine dust that blew around for the next year.

Ever since, I've had a lot of sympathy for anyone who gets flooded. It's just a mess. The parts of Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts that got hit will have a long, hard recovery from the massive damage they sustained.

[george wilson]

We just got power back a few hours ago. Fortunately no big trees fell on our house. The linemen came in and cut down a dogwood tree right in our yard for no good reason. I told them I wanted the wood,at least. I make some antique repros for my customer out of dogwood,such as 18th.C. thread spools,which are are delicate turnings with razor sharp edges on their ends.

We had to buy a new generator as the old one,though still in like new condition blew out the generator part. A Honda,too. Cheaply put together interior parts vibrated loose and messed up the armature.

I finally got the new generator,which is larger than the Honda was,connected up so it will operate the well pump. 7000 watts seems to do a lot more than the 4500 we had before. I was running the well pump.65" T.V.(which in the past was told to not run a T.V. with a generator,power not clean enough),2 floor lamps,a hot plate,the fridge,sometimes the microwave,and theDVD player. Didn't run everything at once. The generator really "dug in"when te well kicked in.

Been all out of sorts with messed up sleep schedule. Everyone was turning their generators on at 6:00 A.M.. I tend to normally stay up till 1:00 and sleep a bit later now that I'm retired.

Everyone was out of everything that anyone wanted to buy,such as a 30 amp 220 volt generator plug,flexible wire,etc. We did have 1 gas station several miles up the road.

Really,I was grateful that a big tree didn't fall on the slate roof. A maple tree just outside our fence went cracking down. It's too buried in dense brush to see how large it was.

We weren't real bad off as some were,though it took some days to find parts and get the water pump working. No lights upstairs,cords all over the floors. The weather was pretty nice,though. Not real hot after the storm.



Thank you for inquiring,everyone!!

[Larry Frank]

I would be interested in how you hooked your generator up to those items. Are you using a transfer switch or are you using a 220 plug on the well pump. I still have not figured out how to take the four connections on the generator to the three wires for my well pump.

[george wilson]

I am by no means much of an electrician. I got a friend to hook it up. He used a multi meter to find the 2 hot wires in the 4 prong outlet from the 220 volt outlet on the generator. He hooked up the 2 hot leads to the pressure switch. One wire each to the black and white wires on the switch. On my pressure switch,they were the wires on the extreme left and right in the row of 4 connections in the switch.

I'd never try to do anything like that on my own. The well is 250' deep,and not too long ago something went wrong(can't recall what) and I had to pay big bucks to get the whole thing pulled up and fixed.

We only had water for the last 2 days of the outage,which started last Saturday. Before that,I had filled a bathtub and 6 five gallon pails full of water. 3 had lids in case we needed to drink it. The tub was for flushing the toilet downstairs,which has a small tank.

There was no light in the bathrooms or upstairs even with a generator0. We sat all morning at Lowes waiting for a trailer load of generators to come in a few days after our old generator broke down. Luckily,I had just bought a Coleman gas camp stove at a thrift store,and we have a gas grill on the covered porch. Things got MUCH better after I managed to find a 30 amp generator plug at an RV store just a few days ago.

I'm leaving the wire(now disconnected) to the pump in the basement,and know how to re attach it now. When Lowes gets more wire and more parts,we are going to do a better job of making switchable wiring added to the panel. Another hurricane is brewing,and then there are always ice storms to cause weeks of outages. They are just as bad as hurricanes,making wires come down.

The year I made my wife the Art Deco jewelry box and table that took months to build,I had kept it at the neighbor's house. I had bought 2 beautiful Galle' style lamps for it. Everything was set up Christmas Eve. Christmas morning,power out for 9 days,and we had no generator then. I had wanted to present it to her all lit up. That didn't work out!

[george wilson]

These storms remind me of 3 years we spent in Alaska without electricity,or water. I was a young teenager then,and much more vigorous!! We lived 1 year in a tarpaper shack while building our small house. Then,2 more years before we had electricity and running water. Longer than that before we had a toilet.

[David Keller NC]

Hope it wasn't too bad on folks down that way. Up here, we didn't have hardly if any wind damage, but the whole state is a wreck from some of the worst flooding of the century, particularly as we were just getting back up to speed from some pretty nasty spring floods. Storms of this type don't usually hit this far north. I remember being in Boston for Floyd, and this was worse; I can't imagine what it's like when you get south enough that they're actually hurricanes.

Trust me as one of us that experiences them at full force on a regular basis - you don't want to (imagine what it's like when you get south enough that they're actually hurricanes). It's sort of like being in a very long-lasting tornado.

Rather unfortunately, intensity ratings in recent years have been influenced by the $$ amount of damage that the storm caused. Doubt this will happen with Irene - it was just too weak for someone to fudge the Saffir-Simpson scale up a notch from 1 to 2. A real hurricane would've done far, far more damage along its track than Irene, even accounting for the catastrophic flooding in Vermont. It is not at all unusual to get 25" plus of rainfall in one 6 to 12 hour period with an intense hurricane, and in some cases that can be over 36" of rainfall if the storm is large and slow moving.

The inland wind damage from an intense storm is also way over what happened (anywhere) from Irene. Generally, you wake up the next morning, and 90% of the houses on the street have 2-3 foot diameter trees on them or in them. These sorts of storms really haven't come around in the last 30 - 40 years, at least that have been publicized. Even the notorious nature of hurricane Katrina would not have been had it not been for the flooding of New Orleans, most of which is below sea level.

Given the prediction of climate scientists of more intense hurricanes in the future, it will be interesting to see if the East & Gulf coasts get a historic storm - that will make Katrina, Ivan, Rita, and Irene look pretty tame.

[David Keller NC]

I finally got the new generator,which is larger than the Honda was,connected up so it will operate the well pump. 7000 watts seems to do a lot more than the 4500 we had before. I was running the well pump.65" T.V.(which in the past was told to not run a T.V. with a generator,power not clean enough),2 floor lamps,a hot plate,the fridge,sometimes the microwave,and theDVD player. Didn't run everything at once. The generator really "dug in"when te well kicked in.

George - Your tv will be fine if run on the generator. If it's an LCD tv, its power consumption is pretty low. If it's a plasma, then it will be not-so-low, typically in the 600 watt range or so. The real issue with electronics on a generator has to do with power cycling. All electronics in the US are designed to run at 60 hz, and older generators were not well regulated as far as run speed and power conditioning. Even so, modern electronics can take a +/- 10% variation in power cycling without burning out major components. Nevertheless, it would still be a good idea to only run 2 out of 3 large power draw appliances at once from even a 7 kva generator. In most houses, those appliances are typically the refrigerator, the water heater, a well pump, and tv, in that order. No-nos are electric cooking and hair dryers - both use enormous amounts of power when they're on, and might burn out components in the generator.

[george wilson]

The T.V. is a plasma 65". I was careful to hook up a surge protector to it. When the water pump would cut in,the generator would really "dig in". After that,it would relax,and the current could spike. The surge protector is for preventing damage from that(you other people who might want to run your T.V.) I was told in the past that generator power wasn't "clean enough" to risk running a T.V.,but apparently things have improved. Like I said,I am weak in electronics,so that's what my electronics friend said.

The generator manual has a chart listing power consumption of quite a number of appliances. A hot plate uses 2500 watts,same as a kitchen stove. We only had a single burner hot plate. Not sure if a single burner uses that much. The chart wasn't detailed.

I wouldn't try to run too many big things at once,as said. We managed o.k.. I was glad the weather was not too hot after the storm. This was the first storm when I had a reasonably decent power supply. The last generator was only 4500 watts. All I tried to run on it was a lamp and the fridge. If the generator part of it is trashed,I'm keeping the beautiful little Honda 2 cylinder 9 h.p. "V" motor. It always started first pull,and was easy to pull as the compression was let off when starting. The new Troy Built is pretty hard to pull. I can't find the H.P. rating of the motor listed anywhere.

I'd like to get a "whole house" generator,but they cost as much to get installed as to purchase,and you have to have a big propane tank. We were burning about $25.00 of gas per day with the 7000 watt generator. Whole house might not be any cheaper,I don't know,but at least I could buy gasoline and refill this generator. There have been worse storms where no one at all was selling gas around here.

By the way,there was a tornado that went through the back end of our old neighborhood,at least a few blocks from our house. I opened the front door just as it went by,and the sudden wind was incredible,even that far away. We had an oak tree in the front yard which was over 12" diameter,and it bent like a bow,but didn't get ripped out. Where the tornado went(and it was just a fairly smallish one),it ripped the top half of several large pine trees off. Our friends had a beech branch stuck down through their kitchen ceiling right where the lighting fixture was. What a mess!!

I hate hurricane weather,but I'll take them rather than tornados. When I was in the first grade,we lived a while in Amarillo,Texas. I saw a 2" X 4" sticking right through a tree when we were driving through an area where a tornado had gone through.

[Pam Niedermayer]

So, whole house generators are flood proof?

Pam

[george wilson]

I don't know if they are flood proof. I'd never buy a house that is in a flood prone area.

P.S.: Not much good to have a working generator in a flooded house,is it? Wear rubber clothes when ever turning a switch on!!

[Matt Meiser]

I can't find the H.P. rating of the motor listed anywhere.

You won't. There was a class action lawsuit because someone's lawnmower said 3.25, but his actually only made 3.21 or something like that. So all the manufacturers just took the HP ratings off.

And I wouldn't run your electronics on a cheap generator (and anything sold at Lowes would be in the cheap category.) The power definitely is not clean. I've lost 2 UPS's and a microwave (which we didn't even use--just plugged in) right after being on generator. Now we unplug all the electronics.

[george wilson]

That kind of stuff is ruining the whole country.

[Pam Niedermayer]

That kind of stuff is ruining the whole country.

Well, seems like it's a result of our stupid litigious citizens looking for a free engine or two. The manufacturers responded precisely as they had to.

Pam

[Pam Niedermayer]

I don't know if they are flood proof. I'd never buy a house that is in a flood prone area.

P.S.: Not much good to have a working generator in a flooded house,is it? Wear rubber clothes when ever turning a switch on!!

That was my point, that in the effort to avoid all consequences of disaster, we make more disasters and waste a lot of money doing it.

Pam

[george wilson]

Sorry,Pam. Not getting proper sleep for several days,and I don't understand your point.