Genmon plugin for XTension (was Re: Whole House Generators)

[James Sentman]

> On Feb 8, 2022, at 4:28 PM, Jerry — MacSolutions <jerry at stlmacguy.com> wrote:
> 
> Ouch!   That cut is going to be a "gift that keeps on giving.”   It’s going to tear open, time and time again, unless you wear something that limits your movement.

It’s healing, I can type a lot better today though Becka nearly added new wounds when she got a look at it ;) At least it wasn’t due to any negligence or preventable stupidity on my part ;) I think I’ll survive. I’m just going to be more or less a lefty for the next week or so.

> 
> Yeah, this whole power situation really has me perplexed.   We (my wife and I) really would rather just go solar, rather than relying on gas lines.   I think that the longest that *our* power was out was about 12 hours when a major transformer was hit during a storm.  My worst case scenario is an earthquake or more topical, civil unrest that causes long term outages of power, water and natural gas supplies.  Maybe the best solution would be to just move to the Caribbean and live off of fish and coconuts?
> 
> On your recommendation of the 3K Inverter Generator… Wouldn’t you end up stockpiling gasoline in your garage or something?  I know that if this were a short-tern outage, just having a gas can filled with fuel on-hand would be nice.  But that fuel can’t just sit in the generator waiting for a disaster to happen.  
> 
> Or, am I just looking at the “half empty” angle on all of this?

I just don’t think that a single solution will meet all your needs. I think that if the scenarios that you mention happen, the major earth quake or massive long term civil unrest you’re not going to be able to stay in one place indefinitely. Your home is not a castle prepared for siege. At some point in such a situation you will have to bug out. If the generators get you past the initial evacuation so that you have more time to get yourself together and wait for the worst crowds on the highways to lighten up then it’s done it’s job. I don’t think you can really plan to stay indefinitely once civilization has collapsed ;) I could really get stuck here for a couple of weeks if we get hit as badly as we did for that storm who’s name I don’t remember. We were lucky to have no major damage to the house, no flooding even reached my crawlspace and no tree fell on the house, though several fell away from it so that was pretty scary. So I do plan to be stuck here that long. The longer we have to stay the less pleasant it’s going to be. If the NG stays on then we’re golden for power and AC. If not we can get by on the smaller generators. But not indefinitely.

As far as stock piling gas, that is basically what I was doing. In rather expensive special storage canisters with enough to run that smaller generator for almost a week. Storing gas is dangerous and if you don’t do it right it can build up to the right concentration and explode taking your entire garage off the side of the house or worse. What I was doing was staggering my buying of it by a year and adding stable or whatever that stuff is that keeps it from going bad for a couple of years. After the hurricane season was over I would start using the 2 year old gas in my car and save the newer gas, then start buying up again as the next hurricane season began. That way it never got so old that I had to find a way to throw it out or recycle it which is a pain. I can’t recall exactly how many gallons I was storing, I’m not doing that anymore. I planned on running the generator at half load about half the time and did the math on a little more than that. It would not have run the big generator for nearly as long of course, but I planned to run that only for a few hours a day to make the main AC drop the house temp and then switch to the smaller one for just keeping the fridges going in between. So now I just have a few gas cans filled up, but not the scary amount that I did have previously. If a storm was approaching I would probably fill up one or 2 more just in case or to share if necessary and the NG was still on.  In the past at least some gas was available here as soon as the bridge was cleared for access. It was expensive though. At least I wouldn’t have needed that much every day.

Which brings up another discussion about price gouging. As someone who lives in an area that does get evacuated every few years and which sometimes gets cut off for short times access to gas is really important to people. For their generators and cars, but also for all the chainsaws that have to run to clear the roads! So when gas is in high supply and you can’t get more some unscrupulous gas stations start price gouging. And the government thinks they can earn your support by making it illegal to sell gas at a higher than usual price. While not immediately intuitive this is exactly the opposite of the right thing to do. When we were isolated for 2 weeks, the first week there was no gas available after what was in the tanks at the only gas station on this side of the bridge went dry. The owner of that gas station made arrangements to get gas brought in by boat! He was going to keep all our generators and chain saws going for us, but it was going to be more expensive. Everybody here would have been happy to pay double for gas for a week just to keep those things running. Unfortunately the government shut him down immediately, nope, you can’t charge more for gas. It was not reasonable to expect him to try to eat the loss of that cost, though he did for a short time on that first load that they tried to shut down which is great and we appreciated it. After that it took almost 10 days of no gas at all before the government agreed to allow him to bring in another load. And everything was back to normal in 3 or 4 more days anyway. So the choice was more expensive gas or no gas at all. And the government chose no gas because all those evil capitalists who were not cut off from supply would have made more money. There has got to be a way to make this work that doesn’t take weeks and doesn’t involve politicians lying to people about how much they are protecting you even as they actually make your life worse. Or.. really that is how politics works in general in my estimation ;) So maybe there isn’t a way to make this work. Just a cautionary tale.



Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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