No, this isn’t the title to my end of year post. We had a big storm come through Seattle and I wanted to document our family’s experience going through it.
The storm was a rapidly developing cyclone called a “bomb” cyclone because the rapid intensification is called “bombogensis.” Thankfully the weather models did a stellar job of predicting it and we knew it was coming. I won’t fully recap the storm because UW weather prof Cliff Mass did a great job of that:
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog: A Pacific “Hurricane” Off the Northwest Coast on Tuesday
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Extreme Offshore Storm Could Produce Damaging Winds over the Western Cascade Foothills
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog: The Deepest Low Pressure Center in Northwest History? Damaging Winds West of the Cascades
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog: The Storm Reveals Itself. The Eastside Wind Threat
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog: A Near Perfect Forecast of Yesterday’s Event. The Next Windstorm Comes into View
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog: The Real Story Behind Tuesday’s Windstorm and Massive Power Outage
I believe it’s the third time I’ve been through a storm like this out here. The other two were in 2006 and 2012. In 2006 around 700,000 people lost power and in 2012 the number was around 475,000. I think they’re still counting people but this storm looks like it landed at around 600,000 people without power. (It’s also unclear if all these number are people or households.) Winds in our area were gusting 40-50mph and a few factors made it extra bad:
- There was a very high pressure system east of the mountains so that created huge winds flowing from east to west. That’s backwards of the way we normally get wind so that will always cause more damage.
- The trees haven’t lost all their leaves yet so that adds more drag. Plus we have a lot of evergreens that never lose their needles.
- This was the first hard blow of the season so there was a lot of dead stuff waiting to fall.
We lost power at 7:30pm on Wednesday night after having it flicker for hours leading up to that. I immediately headed out and dug the generator out because there was a lull in the rain and I didn’t expect the power to come back any time soon. I was thankful to do it during my normal waking hours instead of wondering if I should get out of bed at 2am to set it up!
We thankfully installed a 240v plug on the outside of the house that feeds directly into our panel using an interlock kit so you can’t accidentally feed power back into the grid or get fed by both sources at the same time. I keep a sheet of OSB in the shed for giving the unit a little shelter from the rain and I just screw some L brackets on the top to hold it together.
Our generator isn’t anything fancy. We bought it back in 2015. In today’s money it looks like something similar is around $530. It does have electric start but otherwise, it’s very basic. This theoretically puts out a constant 3500 watts with bursts up to 4400. The challenge is that there’s no readout which tells me how close I am to that limit. So my default behavior is to flip off all the circuits and then carefully turn on the few that I need. Thankfully most lighting is LED now so we were able to use a lot of the house lights and that in itself has a big morale boost. Beyond that I would generally pick two 15-20amp circuits to enable. We have two fridges so those got the power most of the time, but at some points I would turn those off and run the furnace. We have gas so the electricity just needs to handle the brains and the blower. Being warm and having light was a huge luxury!
Some notes for next time this happens:
- I was able to run the indoor fridge and the furnace at the same time.
- I was able to run the tankless water heater and the bath fans together so we could shower.
- I ran the generator for 27 hours during our 40-hour outage and used about 5 gallons of gas.
The challenge for me was that we use this very rarely and I haven’t built up a lot of comfort with it yet. Our bedroom is on the other end of the house and I can’t really hear the generator running because there are a lot of others running too. So if something went wrong, I don’t know how I’d notice. I also didn’t have a good feeling for how long it would run on a tank of gas. All this led me to sleep on the couch both nights that our power was out waking up periodically to walk out and check the generator, etc. It wasn’t very restful but I was still thankful to have it.
We all took guesses about when the power would come back on and Elijah was only off by about 2 hours! I was just getting ready to drive to campus to do a little work and as I put the gas cans in the truck for a refill, the power came back on. It was perfect timing because our internet came back right away too and I was able to resume working from home. We felt very fortunate to get power back when hundreds of thousands were still waiting for it.
We’ve gotten great use out of this generator a half dozen times over the last 9 years which makes me feel like it’s ok to upgrade. The main features I want are some way to know how hard I’m pushing the generator and a good inverter that produces a clean power signal. (Read up on Total Harmonic Distortion in generators if you want to geek out.) But the quick summary is that our battery backups freak out if I try to charge them on the generator so I’m too nervous to hook up any sensitive electronics and I’m nervous that it’s going to fry one of our appliances. It’s hard to justify that much money when we already have something that works and we need it so rarely.
Even though we don’t need it very often, I was thankful for our twice yearly Survival Sunday routine. One of my tasks on that list is to change the generator oil when needed and fire it up to make sure it’s running smoothly. I had just done that in September so when I needed it during this storm, I turned the key and it fired right up.
I realize that we are privileged to have had such a relatively easy path through this storm and our prayers go out for those still waiting for power or dealing with much greater impacts from the storm.