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diy solar

Massive Texas power outage

Weather is calling for 60mph here in Charleston tomorrow. Crossing my fingers
 
Q-Dog said:
Power company is saying we may not get grid power back until Sunday.

There is a tree down -- blocking our street -- that has some of the power lines pinned under it. I saw at least 2 poles bent over pretty far but I don't know if any poles were broken. I saw 2, possibly 3 houses where the lines from the street are under downed trees.

I loaned our gas generator to a neighbor but may have to get it back for a couple of hours if the sun doesn't come out tomorrow.
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Any idea how many people are on your street/circuit impacted?

The longest outages are the smallest <10 customer outages. Even if the damage is minimal (clear a tree, push back a pole and refuse) crews are typically dispatched for biggest outages then to the smallest outages.

We spent 3 days March 2023 without power just due to snow loading dragging some branches down, snow melted the first day, but crews just weren’t available to close the fuse back in.
 
Subdood said:
Sorry to burst your teacher's bubble, but he's incorrect.Your teacher's mental beatings were based on misinformation.

From Wikipedia-

English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages.[16] Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles, and into the Frisian languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent.

Sure it has Latin influences, along with Greek, but its origins are Germanic. French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese are definitely Romance languages, but not English.
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Learn something new everyday! lol. I stand corrected.
 
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Sanwizard said:
Weather is calling for 60mph here in Charleston tomorrow. Crossing my fingers
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Crossing your fingers for an outage?

I must admit, I dare the grid to go down now that we have batts. But I shouldn't be too cocky, we have an older house down the hill which has two freezers and a frig in it, and our system isn't hooked up there. So when the power does go out, I take our portable solar generator down there and rotate it around the 3 appliances since it's not powerful enough to run them all at once. I need to move a couple of those up here and put them on our inverter circuit.
 
rogerdw said:
I can't see how they are attached to the I-beams ... I assume they were otherwise they should be in the next state by now. 😁
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That's what I was thinking. They're sails just waiting for a strong gust of wind to get them airborne.

I heard that the straight line winds in Houston were close to 100mph, plus there was an EF1 tornado involved. No wonder those big transmission towers got mangled.
 
This storm reminded me of the derecho that struck my Mom and sister's area in Oklahoma last year. It hit the Tulsa area particularly hard, I think 75% of the county was without power. Mom and sis didn't get their power on for like 3 or 4 days, and this was in the summer. They were miserable without any A/C, lost most of the food in their freezer. My sister tried to sleep in the car one night it was so hot in the house. After a couple days of this, they were about to go get a hotel room but thankfully the power came back on. That wasn't a tornado, it was just a 50 mile wide wall of 80+mph winds that did all the damage.
 
Bluedog225 said:
Not attached. Just gravity. And a low wind spot.
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Mine are just resting with a slight tilt on the ground. Eventually, I will anchor them but I also want to get a shutter system to cover them. Just had some very damaging hail a few clicks from our place. I feel like there are only so many bullets a person can dodge before one hits.
 
my parents lost power during the storms for about 24 hours -- they have propane generator backup they'd run during the day. Power was restored for them yesterday.

I'm in DFW -- we got a few light showers luckily and none of the crazy stuff.
 
I was sitting in the conex when it came in. I’ve got a big aluminum ladder stored on top. The first wind came in and dragged the ladder the entire length of the conex.

Wow what a racket! I couldn’t imagine what was making the noise. Thought something had gone seriously wrong in the world.

But 9 feet down, the panels were fine.
 
Bluedog225 said:
I was sitting in the conex when it came in. I’ve got a big aluminum ladder stored on top. The first wind came in and dragged the ladder the entire length of the conex.

Wow what a racket! I couldn’t imagine what was making the noise. Thought something had gone seriously wrong in the world.

But 9 feet down, the panels were fine.
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Seems lucky that PV just laying on a couple of I-beams didn't do a 'Dorothy' on ya, end up in Kansas somewhere!!
 
740GLE said:
Any idea how many people are on your street/circuit impacted?

The longest outages are the smallest <10 customer outages. Even if the damage is minimal (clear a tree, push back a pole and refuse) crews are typically dispatched for biggest outages then to the smallest outages.

We spent 3 days March 2023 without power just due to snow loading dragging some branches down, snow melted the first day, but crews just weren’t available to close the fuse back in.
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The last update I got said 135 customers still affected by this outage. Yesterday the number was over 2000. Lots of PoCo trucks driving by our house in both directions, so likely more than one problem affecting us.

I should add, the sun is out with very few clouds this morning so we should get a little charge into the batteries. Batteries at 37% this morning, so we should be able to get by another night without the gasoline generator.
 
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Q-Dog said:
The last update I got said 135 customers still affected by this outage. Yesterday the number was over 2000. Lots of PoCo trucks driving by our house in both directions, so likely more than one problem affecting us.

I should add, the sun is out with very few clouds this morning so we should get a little charge into the batteries. Batteries at 37% this morning, so we should be able to get by another night without the gasoline generator.
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Best of luck, the tail end of major events is hugely frustrating when 10 bucket trucks all roll to the same outage, all driving by smaller outages they could break up and tackle.

Sad thing is many of the contractors working storm restoration have zero incentive to restore all customers as soon as possible, as soon as that happens the double/triple time dries up and they have to head home.
 
I feel for the Texans without power. Contractors all over the country are probably headed that direction to assist with repairs. This years hurricane prediction are off the charts.

There is probably a lot of grid tie net metering solar systems that aren't doing anything right now. It could be cool if someone could come up with an idea to simulate the grid enough to get them to produce power for the homeowner safely
 
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