I feel like I'm only just now settling back into a normal routine after the ice storms that hit us Sunday night / Monday morning.
It took down some power lines and I was without power for days.
I went to help the neighbor start her generator and she had her generator wired up so that it was powering circuits in the house.
I, on the other hand, was just using my generator to run some small space heaters. I also had to run them in low power mode. Turns out, they only kept the house at about 45 degrees. Good enough to keep the pipes from freezing, though.
On Monday, I did some reading up on what was required to use the generator to run circuits in your house, but Lowe's was sold out. I figured I wasn't going to be able to do anything until the next day, and the electric company was saying they were going to have power restored on Tuesday evening.
On Tuesday, they updated their estimate to say that most houses would be restored by Wednesday evening. So, I ran out, bought the transfer switch that would let me hook into a handful of circuits on my main circuit board.
My main concern was my furnace. It was taking every bit of electricity the generator could muster to run those 4 small space heaters because electric heating elements take a LOT of juice.
I got everything hooked up and after some minor troubleshooting, got the furnace running. Unfortunately, the previous owners of my home didn't label any of the circuits. So, by trial and error I found some of the more important ones like the refrigerator and the bedroom where I'm sleeping.
About 3 hours after I finished all that, the power company had the power restored. I'm all set for next time something like this happens, though.
I also fried my generator. It's toast. Lucky for me, my brother was selling a generator and I bought it.
It's amazing how a disruption like that just sort of throws your whole life out of whack. The warehouse (where I have my business) was out of power, too. So, we did a little bit of business, but the work in the office got backed up a bit.
Now, things are back to normal. I can go back to eating right and exercising. Glad that's over. I still need to go to the hardware store and fix a thing or two on the generator and install all the wiring a little more permanently than it is, right now. After that, I'll be ready for the next outage.
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