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Storm Damage
After the remnants of hurricane Ike ripped through the Ohio Valley yesterday bringing sustained winds of 50 mph and gusts reported up to 80 mph for several hours, we feel lucky to have such little damage to the house. Here you can see part of a 40 ft tall pine tree that snapped in our front yard and the neighborhood men trying to get it down safely without damage to my newly installed raingarden.
We were without power for almost exactly 24 hours, but Duke Energy is reporting that power will not be restored to everyone for about a week. All in all, over 800,000 people in the Duke service area - about 90% of it's customers were without power at some point. That is the most in this region's history according to the local news reports. I think there are still about 500,000 people without power. We had sent many of our crews down to assist with Hurricane Ike clean up in Texas, but the crews had to then be recalled back to Cincinnati. So we have to wait for those crews to get back home. Luckily, we had little damage and only one day and night without power. The kids were troopers and we tried to make it fun like camping. The worst part was driving around this morning (with all of the traffic lights out) to try to find ice to save the food in our refrigerator. We were able to cook with our grill and gas cooking stove inside, and our solar hot water heater performed beautifully of course. So the refrigeration was the only issue. For those of you that called to see if we were exempt from the power woes because we were solar, remember that we have a grid-tied system, so when the grid goes out, so do we. This is to protect workers who might be out working on the line - it wouldn't be good for us to be sending power down lines that they thought were dead. And also, we do not have any battery storage for our solar power, so we were just as much in the dark as everyone else. But again, it wasn't really that much of an inconvenience except for the refrigeration and having to fill the toilet tanks with water from milk jugs because no power to our cistern pump means no power to fill the toilet tanks with our rain water. There is a small add-on system that we can get that has some additional safety features and a small bank of batteries so that we can run critical circuits from solar power when the grid goes out. We may consider that more seriously now.
Below you can see that all of the siding and solar panels on our house made it through the storm safely and are in top shape. The only damage to the house was to the western-most sunshade above the first floor window. You can see below how it was damaged in the middle when a branch or something hit it. Actually, it's great that the sunshade was there to take the impact and protect the window.
We were without power for almost exactly 24 hours, but Duke Energy is reporting that power will not be restored to everyone for about a week. All in all, over 800,000 people in the Duke service area - about 90% of it's customers were without power at some point. That is the most in this region's history according to the local news reports. I think there are still about 500,000 people without power. We had sent many of our crews down to assist with Hurricane Ike clean up in Texas, but the crews had to then be recalled back to Cincinnati. So we have to wait for those crews to get back home. Luckily, we had little damage and only one day and night without power. The kids were troopers and we tried to make it fun like camping. The worst part was driving around this morning (with all of the traffic lights out) to try to find ice to save the food in our refrigerator. We were able to cook with our grill and gas cooking stove inside, and our solar hot water heater performed beautifully of course. So the refrigeration was the only issue. For those of you that called to see if we were exempt from the power woes because we were solar, remember that we have a grid-tied system, so when the grid goes out, so do we. This is to protect workers who might be out working on the line - it wouldn't be good for us to be sending power down lines that they thought were dead. And also, we do not have any battery storage for our solar power, so we were just as much in the dark as everyone else. But again, it wasn't really that much of an inconvenience except for the refrigeration and having to fill the toilet tanks with water from milk jugs because no power to our cistern pump means no power to fill the toilet tanks with our rain water. There is a small add-on system that we can get that has some additional safety features and a small bank of batteries so that we can run critical circuits from solar power when the grid goes out. We may consider that more seriously now.
Below you can see that all of the siding and solar panels on our house made it through the storm safely and are in top shape. The only damage to the house was to the western-most sunshade above the first floor window. You can see below how it was damaged in the middle when a branch or something hit it. Actually, it's great that the sunshade was there to take the impact and protect the window.
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