The pandemic has shaped a lot of the decisions we’ve made as a newly-minted family and not always in a happy way. When the first wave of the storm hit it took down power all over the city. Most of that first wave of outages was ice dropping branches that should have been pruned years ago onto overhead power lines.
Our house lost power on Saturday, February 13th around 10:45AM and it was off all day. Late in the afternoon we got a hotel room. We didn’t want to try to manage the 1-year-old situation in the dark and increasing cold, hoping the power would come back before the house became uninhabitable. So we drove through the ice to a nearby hotel and just hoped we wouldn’t run into a situation that might be a big Covid risk. Having to go to a hotel during a pandemic was something that we were very unhappy about and we hope to not have to do again. It’s part of why we’ve spent the last few days in this Airbnb house. We can remain isolated in a house which we can’t do in a hotel.
We were fortunate that most people hadn’t lost power yet and the hotel was lightly attended and we were able to get in and out without significantly exposing our daughter to anyone. We were also lucky in that we had an HEB curbside order already in for Sunday morning. Our power was restored by the line crews, who hadn’t yet been overwhelmed, by early Sunday morning. I took the family home, went and got groceries and then we hunkered down.
Starting that Sunday, the Texas electric grid started failing and entire circuits were “load shed” to keep the grid generation from losing sync. A loss of sync would have meant a grid restart from nothing which could have taken weeks or longer. After the storm it was determined that the entire grid was about five minutes from total collapse at one point.
Our house was spared that second failure. We are on the same circuit as three hospitals and there is not enough granularity in the power distribution to shut off individual customers in those kinds of situations. We retained power through the worst of the storm and also never completely lost water though many parts of the city did for days after the power outage. Our natural gas supply was fine the whole time so we were able to keep the house warm. The main house furnace is gas fired so we only needed enough electricity to start and run the blower.
Austin Energy repeatedly asked people who had power to use as little as possible. As such, I had everything unplugged or off at the breaker I could. We used one light in the house at a time. Kept the house as cool as we could while still being safe for our daughter and only used the gas for cooking. If I remember correctly we were averaging about 300 watt-hours for two or three days.
Once the storm was over and the grid had recovered there was a lot of talk about what to do. One of the things on that list was to improve the various utilities’ ability to turn off individual customers. The threat then being that next time we would not be spared the rod.
Power has always been surprisingly inconsistent at this house. It will randomly go out for two to three hours in the middle of the day. The neighborhood is older than most in the city. The utilities are all overhead on poles. No one maintains their own trees and few call Austin Energy to do the free pruning. Hell, my neighbors have a giant wild grape that has grown all over everything again after it was cut back for being on the power lines two years ago.
This brings me to the point of all of this. We, along with many, many others, have purchased a home standby generator. Like the previously discussed gutter project, I started working on this one in late spring. I got three proposals from late May to early June and we selected one and got the ball rolling. On July 15th, a 22kW Generac was sitting on a pad in my back yard.
Here’s where Austin Energy comes in to help again. The date I was given for the power shutdown so the meter work could be done was December 30th. That is a six month queue. Astonishing. And I had to hassle a bunch of people to get that work scheduled.
So while all of the other house repairs have been progressing and I’ve been wrangling all of that, I’ve also been repeatedly following up with the electrical and plumbing managers at my vendor to make sure everyone knows what’s going on and we have dates scheduled for everything. It would be a real shame to have done all of this and not have the generator useable when we need it after a full year.
The trenching in the back yard was done Dec 20th. The plumbing was completed the next day, Dec 21st. The electrical work was done on Dec 30th. Electrical inspection passed this week, I think on Jan 5th but I’m not sure because I wasn’t home, and the trench was refilled.
The final plumbing inspection is this coming Monday, Jan 10th and if that passes we can have our test run and break a bottle of champagne over its bow or something.
The electrical conduit and gas line just kinda stick up out of the ground next to the generator so I’m going to have to do some child-proofing around it. I have some other small fencing I’d like to get done so maybe that can turn into a future project. We have a fence company we use now which is a story that will probably be its own smaller post. I’ve a mind to get some signage made to resemble the old Seaholm Power Plant Light and Power signs and have them put up as part of the child barricade. I think that would look nice. Little red LEDs behind some deco lettering. Real classy.
