Portland OR: 65-90 MPH Winds - Is Your Generator Ready?

[Ivan Seeking]

Here we go. They are talking about 65 mph winds in portland, and I think up to 90 on the coast.

I had better see if my generator still works.

 

[Moonbear]

Just get back to the house before it starts...we don't need you trapped in your office all night again because you're fearing that whomping willow, or whatever that tree is that tries to kill you in storms.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Just get back to the house before it starts...we don't need you trapped in your office all night again because you're fearing that whomping willow, or whatever that tree is that tries to kill you in storms.

Its not just the one tree, its the other hundred or so. But I have the car down here tonight.

We have a 5KW Honda generator that, as near as Tsu and I can recall, hasn't been started in at least five, and probably seven years. I could hardly believe it. After a little prep and clean up - drained the old fuel, check oil etc - it started on the first pull.

 

[Pengwuino]

Its not just the one tree, its the other hundred or so. But I have the car down here tonight.

We have a 5KW Honda generator that, as near as Tsu and I can recall, hasn't been started in at least five, and probably seven years. I could hardly believe it. After a little prep and clean up - drained the old fuel, check oil etc - it started on the first pull.

How loud is the generator?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

About like a lawn mower I guess. Why?

 

[Pengwuino]

Seems kinda loud for something you actually need to have running next to a house.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Seems kinda loud for something you actually need to have running next to a house.

We have an area that is somewhat sound insulated by three large rock walls, but for exteded periods we could run it down in my office storage area, which is over 300 feet away and enclosed on three sides.

Have you ever gone without power for a day or two? The noise doesn't really matter much when you want coffee!

 

[Pengwuino]

Yah I've gone a few days without power but damn... a lawnmover 24/7? screw that :P

 

[Ivan Seeking]

No doubt, if it was going to last long the gen would get moved to the office. But it sure is nice to have when you need it. We did need it once for a couple of days.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

...and out here, when you don't have electric, you don't have water or, by consequence, a toilet.

 

[zoobyshoe]

...and out here, when you don't have electric, you don't have water or, by consequence, a toilet.

In The Big Chill one of the characters said the great thing about the country was that the whole outdoors was one great big toilet.

 

[moose]

...and out here, when you don't have electric, you don't have water or, by consequence, a toilet.

Really? Why?

 

[turbo]

Really? Why?

People like us have wells, with electric pumps to bring up the water. No power, no water. I also have a Honda generator for just that reason (that and keeping the freezer and fridge running). We had an ice storm in the dead of winter a number of years ago that knocked out power for weeks in some areas. It gets really cold here in Maine in February. There were millions of trees down or damaged, thousands of which took out adjacent power lines. My nephew visited with a generator a few times, so we could run the furnace for a few hours and keep the house from freezing up. Soon after that, I bought my own.

 

[Tsu]

We also have a woodstove for those power outages. Keeps the house REAL warm - and you can cook on it!

 

[Janus]

...and out here, when you don't have electric, you don't have water or, by consequence, a toilet.

Well, you have a creek, so you have the oldest form of running water there is; Run and get it.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

What amazes me is all the objections to having a generator!

City folks, eh, Turbo-1?.

Do you want me to plow the fields using a horse as well?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Btw turbo-1 and interested generator users, , when I bought mine, the guy at the shop suggested that I kill the engine with the fuel valve rather than the off switch. That way all of the gas gets sucked out of the carb and lines before it dies. I think this made all the difference.

Oh, this is cool. My truck has three gas tanks. So I keep them all full which gives us a 50 gallon reserve.

Janus, how did you make out? I guess W Linn was hit pretty hard.

 

[Moonbear]

I'm not sure I understand the objections to the generator either. It's not like you sleep on top of it. When the alternative is several days without heat and running water, it hardly seems like all that big of a deal. And if it really bothered you, you could probably bundle up well and kill it at night when you don't really want to be tending to it anyway.

At the one farm I worked at, we had a generator that ran off a coupling to a tractor engine. Had to use it only once when we had a thunderstorm come through and knock out power smack dab in the middle of an experiment that couldn't be stopped. Everyone got lessons on how to start it up, but we all decided afterward that we'd much rather just keep a cell phone with us and call the farm manager to do it if it was needed, mostly because we were paranoid we'd forget the all-important BIG SWITCH that kept the power from feeding back to the main lines. It was mostly there as backup for the freezers in case of any long-term power outages (we had a few decades worth of experimental samples stored in the freezers there), and for the light-controlled rooms whenever there was an experiment going on that required special light schedules.

Janus, I love that concept of running water, "Run and get it!" Though, after seeing pictures of Ivan's "stream" after a storm, I'm not sure anyone would want to get near that thing to get a bucket of water. Though, I guess Ivan could always install an old-fashioned hand-pump on the well.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Actually, being high in iron and various minerals, the water out of the creek is absolutely horrible; hence the elaborate well system once discussed.

 

[Moonbear]

Actually, being high in iron and various minerals, the water out of the creek is absolutely horrible; hence the elaborate well system once discussed.

Polluted, or just because of all the mud and detritis that gets churned up when it's running high?

Nevermind...you edited and I didn't notice.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Drinking the water directly is like licking a piece of rusty iron.

MB, you're fairly remote aren't you? The picture of the road near your drive looked pretty isolated.

 

[Moonbear]

Drinking the water directly is like licking a piece of rusty iron.

MB, you're fairly remote aren't you? The picture of the road near your drive looked pretty isolated.

No, I'm pretty close to the university actually, I just happen to live next to a cattle pasture, which is the view from my drive. The road doesn't get much traffic either because it doesn't lead to much of anywhere that you can't get to faster by taking a different road (other than other houses), but there are other housing developments pretty close, and I live in a townhouse right now (until I figure out if I'm staying or not), so not really remote, but it's certainly more rural than suburban right here. Though, you don't have to drive very far to leave civilization behind completely. I'm technically outside the "city" limits (I think it only counts as a city when you include the students in the population though...our "downtown" is about two blocks by two blocks )

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Did you grow up a city or country girl?

 

[turbo]

What amazes me is all the objections to having a generator!

City folks, eh, Turbo-1?.

Do you want me to plow the fields using a horse as well?

Yep! I have a compact generator with a 5hp Honda motor that can help me save all the frozen food that we have grown (or bought from local farmers) over the past year or two, and that can help me keep the house lit and comfortable. If that is not a wise investment, I challenge any of the nay-sayers to explain why it is not. The city-dwellers may have the luxury of gravity-fed water and centrally-based services, but when those fail, they are screwed. I have a tiny little wood stove and have burned probably about 2 cords of wood so far this winter - the oil furnace has only come on a couple of times and can't have burned more than a couple of gallons of fuel at the most. If the electrical service fails, I will have to fuel the generator (perhaps a couple of bucks a day) to preserve our frozen foods, worth many hundreds of dollars. If you are not self-sufficient, you place your existence in the hands of the local bureacracy - not a really smart thing to do.

 

[Janus]

Actually, being high in iron and various minerals, the water out of the creek is absolutely horrible; hence the elaborate well system once discussed.

Maybe not up to drinking standards, but I'm sure it would still work for flushing the toilet.

Janus, how did you make out? I guess W Linn was hit pretty hard.

We got off easy. We never lost power, and I slept through the whole thing.

 

[Janus]

Janus, I love that concept of running water, "Run and get it!"

It's a system I well familiar with.
When I was 10, we lived in a house where, for two months, the only source of water was the "run and get it" variety from a creek about 50 yards behind the house.
The house was a "fixer upper" that my folks had bought and which had not been lived in for quite a while and had been systematically stripped and vandalized. (You've heard the saying, "They took everything but the kitchen sink"? They took the kithen sink!)
The bathroom plumbing had taken quite a beating, so for that two months, our bathroom was a "one-holer" out behind the house.


Though, after seeing pictures of Ivan's "stream" after a storm, I'm not sure anyone would want to get near that thing to get a bucket of water. [/QUOTE]

Luckily, by the time winter came we had improved our situation to an electric pump which drew its water from the same creek. Of course, from time to time when it rained hard, the creek would swell and the foot-valve would get washed down the creek and we would have to go hunt for it.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Maybe not up to drinking standards, but I'm sure it would still work for flushing the toilet.

We only replaced all of iron and mineral ruined water appliances - washer, dishwasher, water heater, tub, toilet, sinks - after putting in the new well system.

So many back seat drivers.

 

[Janus]

We only replaced all of iron and mineral ruined water appliances - washer, dishwasher, water heater, tub, toilet, sinks - after putting in the new well system.

So many back seat drivers.

It's not as if we are talking about using it on a constant basis, just as an temporary emergency back-up.

Kidding aside, I have no objection to your generator. I wish that we had had one back when we got our water supply from an electric pump. It sure would have beat the heck out of toting water from the creek, especially when it was under the same weather conditions as caused the power outage in the first place.

 

[Moonbear]

Did you grow up a city or country girl?

I grew up in the suburbs, but my mom spent part of her life growing up on her grandfather's farm. My greatgrandparents were long dead by the time I came along, so I don't know anything about what they were like, but from my parent's stories, they sounded a bit cold...they raised rabbits, and let my mom have the runt of one litter as a pet...but only until Fluffy showed up in the stew pot one day. I can understand that to a farmer, one rabbit probably looks pretty much the same as every other rabbit, but you don't give one to a kid to keep as a pet and then make dinner out of it!

My grandparents still kept a lot of the country habits...even when they were offered city water, they opted to keep their well water (they think it tastes good......I think it has always had a metallic taste to it; their house still has radiators for heat too, and just window units for air-conditioning...but they live in an area that is now highly coveted by "city-folk", so I'm rather curious to see what happens when it's time to sell that house...I suspect it's still going to sell for a ridiculously high price, but the buyers will plan to gut everything). Anyway, we used to say we were going to the farm when we'd visit them. They used to grow an enormous garden every year (well, my grandfather did, and my grandmother was happy it kept him out of her hair until it was time to pick the vegetables). Their yard was two lots deep and still has an extra half lot to one side that they bought up and isn't large enough to sell as an individual lot. All along the perimeter were mature fruit trees...several varieties of apple, peach, pear, plum...it looked like an orchard. When you walked out of the back door of the house, there was enough lawn for one of those old gliders or sliders or whatever they were called...two seats facing each other that you could rock back and forth...a small grassy area, grandma's large clothesline (she never had a dryer, but had poles set up to string 3 clotheslines across), a row of blueberry bushes, and then garden everywhere. The entire second lot and the half lot on the side were tilled and garden planted. My grandfather still plants a modest garden on the half lot, but sold off the back lot when illness started making it too difficult to keep up with the work.

We used to get enough vegetables out of that garden to freeze and can and eat fresh for several families to live off...my grandparents always had a large chest freezer packed full, plus an entire wall of shelves of canned goods in the basement, as did my parents (we actually had to build an extra storage area in the basement for all the jars of canned goods...I grew to really hate September when every weekend was spent canning vegetables until my fingers were raw from snapping beans or peeling tomatoes or shucking corn), and my aunt and uncle, plus there was still plenty leftover that my grandparents would give away to neighbors or families at church that needed some extra food. People used to tell him he should set up a roadside stand and sell some of the vegetables, but my grandfather always insisted that as long as his family was well-provided for, he would give away any extra...he liked the idea of giving the food to people he knew would appreciate it and needed it, and didn't want to sell it to a bunch of strangers who could afford to buy all their food at the supermarket (even if he proudly admitted it wasn't nearly as good as his homegrown vegetables). (Oh, yeah, we also had a rather large garden in our own yard...all the extra seed and seedlings my grandfather didn't have room to plant wound up in our yard...a LOT of tomatoes, once or twice we grew corn, a few rows of beans or peas, spinach, some cucumbers...we also grew the garlic...once you plant it once and get it started, it'll come back every year on its own...it didn't look as pretty as what you buy in the store, but it tasted all the same).

My cousins, sister and I would joke that we were the migrant workers. In the spring, my father would help out with tilling the garden, then it was the job of the kids to run along behind and pick out any and all rocks we could find (I'm sure a few got thrown at siblings along the way to keep it fun ). All summer long, we'd help pick weeds (when we were little, we only were given that job after the plants were big enough for us to easily know the difference between the vegetables and the weeds...when we got older and could identify the seedlings, we could help with weeding around seedling beds too), and pluck off the potato bugs and tomato worms as we found them. And then fall would come, and it was time to harvest. I HATED it when my grandparents would call that the beans were ready, bring the kids over to help pick them. I don't remember ever being too young to not help pick something. When we were very little, we were given baskets to pick up the fallen fruit from the trees, and as we got older, we moved onto picking beans or ripe tomatoes, then corn as we learned to tell the difference between the ears that were ready to pick and those that weren't (I can feel the outside of an ear of corn and tell you if it's good without ever having to resort to peeling back the husk...of course, when I was a kid, it was somewhat irrelevant...you just cut out the worm or bad kernels and cooked the rest anyway), and then when we were teenagers, we could help with everything, including digging the potatoes...the meal after a long day of harvesting inevitably included a lot of potatoes skewered by youngsters weilding a pitchfork until we learned better to dig in from the sides and not too close to the plant itself.

Oops, sorry, I got carried away reminiscing. As much as I hated the work then, I do miss snacking off vegetables picked straight from the vine, and even though it was a lot of work, it was also a lot of fun having the whole family out together; it sure seems it was a lot better way to grow up than spending the weekends sitting alone with a Playstation.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

See, I too was a complete city kid [suburbs of LA] and our idea of rural was several vacant lots on one block. I never got to experience farm life less our two family trips to SD. And when we did finally go to a farm, guess what I got to do? Yep, work! Of course for two weeks twice in my life, it was fun. I got to drive the tractor and ...not sure what we were doing now...it wasn't pulling a plow, but maybe some kind of seed knocker-offer, or something. I remember coring wool samples, and then we had some barn type duties. The best part was that even at age eight, the first trip, I got to drive things - cars, trucks, tractor, motorcycles, and of course we rode horses which was the most fun. One day my cousin and I rode off into the Black Hills and camped for a couple of days, which was awesome. In fact, now that I think about it, those trips probably had a lot to do with my willingness to move to Oregon. And I guess we now know why your are a sheep brain biologist and not a horticulturist.

Did this all influence your interest in biology or was there a different movitivation altogether?