![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ice storm in westford
Dec. 12th, 2008 02:23 pmWell, last night didn't get us very good sleep as our area got HAMMERED by the ice storm. LOTS of branches down on our property and everywhere else. many BIG ones that shook the whole house when they hit the ground, waking us up several times. None actually hit the house, which was good.
Power has been out since last night at 10:30 or so. Stupid me, totally forgot that means the SUMP PUMP doesnt have power, so i woke up to L saying "Dear, the basement is under two inches or so of water.
Ugh. I've talked about this scenario many times previously, in terms of having a battery backed system so if we werent around to hook up a generator to handle this we wouldnt flood the basement. but here i was HOME all the time and it slipped my mind and we went to sleep without doing anything to prevent this. Ack.
Overnight, our phone lines got taken out as well, so no phone and no net for a while. Verizon said they have us in the queue and think they can fix the phone line by Monday afternoon.
OK; so this day has been so far:
1) Get Honda eu200i generator (the small one) running the sump pump and clear out the basement. Inventory
what got hosed and what didn't. Thank Ghu that the welding area of the basement is higher, or i'd be out
one of my welders and the plasma cutter. They survived. Overall, probably not more than $500 in damaged
goods.
2) L went to check out the local starbucks to see if she could get net for work stuff. No go, everyone else was doing that, so they were full. She started to go down to Woburn.
3) before she could get too far, though, i had managed to follow our downed phone and cable lines, figure out
which ones were the real ones, and determine that while the tree droppings had sheared the cable, the feed
from the pole still showed line voltage. I stripped off some of the insulation from both sides, attached a
network jack to both cable ends, and connected them back together with a 25 foot cat5 cable. Stuck
terminations in ziplock bags, and verified that we had a working phone line in the house again.
4) ran extension cords to the computer room. brought up the main server and the DSL hardware. Yay! the kluge is good enough that the DSL still works. Called L and told her we had net.
5) Built a backfeed cable for our *bigger* generator. Pulled the main breaker from our electrical panel and am now backfeeding the house through the beefy 240 feed outlet in the machine shop. House now has complete power connection, albeit only 4KW worth available. It'll do.
Still to do: wire up temporary outlet to the now disconnected main breaker and put a buzzer or something on it so we know when we eventually get grid power restored, and i can go rewire everything.
Inventory boxes of electrical stuff that got soaked and see what's salvageable. [done]
Get more gasoline for the generators. [done]
Set up inverter system to run sump pump off of tonight. [done]
Dissasemble Maytag Neptune washer, to see if the water level got to the point where the high-voltage servo motor control board is. [Thank you, Maytag Engineers, for kindly locating a high-voltage board, and a pricey one at that to replace, on the *bottom* of the unit, *right next to the drain pump*, the *most likely part* to spring a leak and spray water chock full of yummy charge carriers around. Not.] [in progress. cleaning water out. servo board OK. various other wire clusters got spooged. drying them out.]
Hmm. What about the gas dryer nozzle and control parts? they're pretty low too... [done. dissasembled, swabbed out, a few electrical tests indicated nothing odd. re-assembled. good.]
And some food might be nice; time for a sandwich...
Power has been out since last night at 10:30 or so. Stupid me, totally forgot that means the SUMP PUMP doesnt have power, so i woke up to L saying "Dear, the basement is under two inches or so of water.
Ugh. I've talked about this scenario many times previously, in terms of having a battery backed system so if we werent around to hook up a generator to handle this we wouldnt flood the basement. but here i was HOME all the time and it slipped my mind and we went to sleep without doing anything to prevent this. Ack.
Overnight, our phone lines got taken out as well, so no phone and no net for a while. Verizon said they have us in the queue and think they can fix the phone line by Monday afternoon.
OK; so this day has been so far:
1) Get Honda eu200i generator (the small one) running the sump pump and clear out the basement. Inventory
what got hosed and what didn't. Thank Ghu that the welding area of the basement is higher, or i'd be out
one of my welders and the plasma cutter. They survived. Overall, probably not more than $500 in damaged
goods.
2) L went to check out the local starbucks to see if she could get net for work stuff. No go, everyone else was doing that, so they were full. She started to go down to Woburn.
3) before she could get too far, though, i had managed to follow our downed phone and cable lines, figure out
which ones were the real ones, and determine that while the tree droppings had sheared the cable, the feed
from the pole still showed line voltage. I stripped off some of the insulation from both sides, attached a
network jack to both cable ends, and connected them back together with a 25 foot cat5 cable. Stuck
terminations in ziplock bags, and verified that we had a working phone line in the house again.
4) ran extension cords to the computer room. brought up the main server and the DSL hardware. Yay! the kluge is good enough that the DSL still works. Called L and told her we had net.
5) Built a backfeed cable for our *bigger* generator. Pulled the main breaker from our electrical panel and am now backfeeding the house through the beefy 240 feed outlet in the machine shop. House now has complete power connection, albeit only 4KW worth available. It'll do.
Still to do: wire up temporary outlet to the now disconnected main breaker and put a buzzer or something on it so we know when we eventually get grid power restored, and i can go rewire everything.
Inventory boxes of electrical stuff that got soaked and see what's salvageable. [done]
Get more gasoline for the generators. [done]
Set up inverter system to run sump pump off of tonight. [done]
Dissasemble Maytag Neptune washer, to see if the water level got to the point where the high-voltage servo motor control board is. [Thank you, Maytag Engineers, for kindly locating a high-voltage board, and a pricey one at that to replace, on the *bottom* of the unit, *right next to the drain pump*, the *most likely part* to spring a leak and spray water chock full of yummy charge carriers around. Not.] [in progress. cleaning water out. servo board OK. various other wire clusters got spooged. drying them out.]
Hmm. What about the gas dryer nozzle and control parts? they're pretty low too... [done. dissasembled, swabbed out, a few electrical tests indicated nothing odd. re-assembled. good.]
And some food might be nice; time for a sandwich...
