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I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year)

Ouch. Does anyone know where the author lives that a couple of times a year is considered "infrequent?"

Decades ago I lived in a rural area of America where we'd have power outages two or three times a year because of storms. But I've lived in more than a dozen cities since then, and the power has only gone out twice. Once about a decade ago during a tornado, and then again last year when the power company replaced a transformer across the street.

I ask because it's my impression that electric service has gotten much more reliable over the years. There are still access issues where I live now (believe it or not, thousands of Americans don't have access to the electric grid at home), but reliability seems improved. Am I living in a bubble when it comes to electricity?

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I live in florida. And in an area where most power is overhead.

Storms during the rainy season usually means i experience cuts. Usually 1-2 times a month for 3-8 hours ea from May-Nov

Hurricanes are usually expected to be 3+ days at minimum of outage. Most recent ones were closer to 14 days.

I have a couple gennys, and interlock kits with 30a hookups on my house during these times. I can run 1 genny on the whole house, or even 2 since i have a sub-panel with another interlock kit.

The only thing i CANT run is my AC. But we have 2-3 window units/portables to get by.

FWIW running generators for days at a time is NOT cheap. on my setup its about 20-30 bucks a day in fuel alone.

Why not just go solar? Florida seems like a perfect place for that.

Cost. Not worth it.

Even with my roof (which is east/west facing) the cost to just install panels would be 20-30k. And my city has a 1:1 buy back...And even assuming i sell them back power it would take a decade to recoup the costs...and by then the panels would be less efficient. And this is with buying 95% panels.

but then during an outage....

So you need something to store it... Short of rednecking a series of deep cycle batteries the Tesla Powerwalls are really the only big option.

And those arent cheap either. To run my house for 2-3 days would be in another 10-30k

I can do all of that with 2x7kw gennys and some ancillaries. With a 14-17kw i could probably run my AC (which have hard start caps on them) Even at 30 bucks a day in gas im still well south of even 10k.

Next step up would probably be a active standby generator with transfer switch and giant Propane tank to fuel it. That would be about 10-15k once permitting and all is done. And that adds complexity and cost. But it would mean i dont have to manually flip breakers and cutover. (as it is, my computers are just set to talk to a NUT server, and shutdown in the event i dont cutover within 10 minutes.)

And during storms supply chains are strained. Its hard to source diesel and LP and sometimes even petrol (in fact i warned a previous company of this, and we almost had to shutdown due to fuel levels). And you have to maintain a contract with LP providers and usually rent a tank from them.

With petrol and my little standby units i can source it myself (3-4 am is the best time during runs on gas), even siphon from one of our cars.

I may spring for a full kit standby one day. But for me, it costs about 2k in generators. Another 1k to have an electrician install the interlock kits. And i can service/manage the gennys myself. swap them out while i do maintenance during extended runs etc.

What is a 95% panel? Solar cell efficiency is generally in the 20-30% range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#/media/F...

I believe GP was talking about "95% offset" rather than 95% efficiency.

So he sized the number of panels to offset 95% of his usage is my guess.

They are panels with slight manufacturing defects that you can buy and wont have a full lifetime or near the normal efficiency. So are less expensive as well.

They used to sell them last time i was looking into it, which was about 3 years ago.

Lived in Florida for about two years. We’d lose power due to the neighborhood transformer exploding a couple of times a year. That must have gotten expensive real quick.

The quality of the residential wiring in the original half of the house was not friendly to my hard disks. I lost four in rapid succession. Got a newer UPS, line interactive, had better luck after that until we moved out of state.

(That month of disk meltdown made me love ZFS. Didn’t lose any data.)

| FWIW running generators for days at a time is NOT cheap. on my setup its about 20-30 bucks a day in fuel alone.

What type/size of generator are you running? Might be worth taking a look at an inverter unit next time; they're much quieter and sip gas. Can't stress the quiet part enough - you can hold a conversation a few feet away easily.

Assuming you need 240v since you mentioned you have an interlock kit; Champion makes a 5,000 watt model for $1K. Will go for 12+ hours on 4 gallons of gas at 25% load. https://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/Champion-100519-Por...

If you can get by with a single 5-8K BTU window unit, a WEN 56200i/Harbor Freight Predator 2000 (I own one) will last for 8-10 hours on a single gallon, keeping both the window AC and kitchen fridge running. They're a clone of the Honda EU2000i/Yamaha EF2000is, and I've found it to be just as reliable. https://wenproducts.com/products/wen-2000-watt-inverter-gene... & https://www.harborfreight.com/2000-watt-super-quiet-inverter...

The wen and harbor freight gens can handle the startup surge of the fridge? What size fridge?

I have looked at inverter generators. But they seem harder to find in larger wattages/capacities. I dont know that i trust Champion engines for long runtimes (days)

I currently have a 7kw (8750 surge) and a 6kw unit. they are dewalt gennys with Honda engines. I really only would trust a B&S, Honda or Kohler engine i feel like.

I think my next purchase will either be a bigger inverter or just a 14-17kw contractor genny and switch to double conversion Battery Backups.

Not quite sure. But what i have does work too. Just that my current generator is approaching a decent number of hours (400-500).

Floridian here as well. Our lines are buried, but the feed is above ground so if a tree takes that out, a couple thousand or so of us have no power for hours. I've thought about a generator, but I can usually keep working on battery (laptop and phone) so, I've not yes seriously considered it.

I've had at least a hundred times more power outages due to protection devices tripping (usually true positives) than the grid going down, so spending 20 minutes to figure out which socket would be the best choice to hook all the communications stuff up to is a much better investment than buying an UPS. FWIW, I had more downtime with the UPS than through actual grid outages because the UPS didn't like a battery hotswap and powered off, or because the batteries started to gas off hydrogen sulfide, which required disconnecting them immediately, but the UPS then powered down (without a battery) and couldn't start without one, either, so it required rewiring a little bit to get going again.

Edit: My UPS is a line-interactive rack-mount APC unit, which as I understand things don't actually contain a power supply, so everything runs from the battery voltage and is supported by the charger in mains operation, but without a battery inserted the charger doesn't work, because its control circuit is powered by the battery.

It is highly variable depending on the location. I know of two electrical grids in the Bible Belt, less than 10 miles apart. One has a power outage every year or two. The other, 10x or more per year is not uncommon.

I've lived in many different states and cities, and "it varies" is about the best you can say. Areas I would expect to be relatively problem free, end up being some of the worst offenders (looking at you, El Paso County, Colorado).

I guess I'm just lucky. Thanks for the clarification.

Germany here. I'd say from personal experience maybe once decade. That includes living in a village of ~3000 for eight years. One time I remember was caused by an excavator where it lasted several hours, the other instances were rather short.

I guess not having earthquakes, floods or hurricanes helps.

The other items at least in the US midwest would be ice storms (ice coating power lines making them heavy and branches getting too coated and falling on power lines) and thunderstorms (50+ mph wind coming through bringing down tree branches on to powerlines) or lightning strikes hitting power transformers.

It's a lot more common in Europe to have buried lines for anything after the high-voltage national backbone, so the grid is much less susceptible to weather.

Where I lived in Sweden, 30% of the network was already underground, but after a large storm in 2005 caused long-lasting power outages, they invested heavily and are now up to 70% underground.

| Am I living in a bubble when it comes to electricity?

Your electricity service may not be as reliable as you think - some utility power can be quite "dirty" with high levels of distortion. There's a lot of infrastructure between you and the power company that can cause problems. A good UPS will not only protect against outages, but will filter/condition utility power.

I live in Chicago, in an older apartment building. I haven't had a full on outage in the past few years, but during major storms I have seen some flickering and other issues. I just looked at the readout on the UPS, and so far it's kicked in 5 times this year. I have a pretty sizable NAS (40TB) and a beefy workstation - the $200 I spent on an APC BR1500MS is well worth the protection.

Safety is another consideration. My parents live on their hobby farm a few hours away - they are the only house at the end of a mile long road with older power lines. I put a similar UPS to keep their alarm/phone/network online. If there's a medical alarm, fire, carbon monoxide, water leak, etc the alarm can still alert the monitoring company, their internet/VoIP landline can fail over to cellular, and we can get alerted that something is up. Again, the peace of mind alone is well worth the $200 (plus $100 for a battery every few years).

Forgot to add, I was living in Virginia during the June 2012 derecho blew through during a period of 100 degree weather (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2012_North_American_derec...). I was without power for an entire week - even in a nice subdivision with buried power lines, in a city of 100K+ people. UPS won't help for that, but it did automatically shut down the NAS and kept my modem/wireless router going for a few hours. Bought a 2,000 watt inverter generator for a few hundred dollars. If you have somewhere to store it, highly recommend purchasing one. Extremely quiet (~50db), sips gas (1 gallon/12 hours), and enough power to keep a fridge, small window AC, and lights going. Even managed to run the dishwasher. https://wenproducts.com/collections/inverter-generators/prod....

Agreed, compared to most developed countries, a couple times/year would be extremely high. But, it's not relatively high for America. I remember living in the midwest and every major storm usually resulted in power lost to somebody. Many of my neighbors had (Generac) generators that would kick in automatically when the power went out. They're so common there that home depot stocks them on the floor.

In Southern California, we rarely get rain, let alone major storms and we still lose power 1-2 times/year.

On the other hand, I lived in a number of areas across Canada and power outages were quite rare despite the harsher climate.

I have a UPS mostly because my laser printer sometimes trips the stupid arc fault circuit breaker[0] that gets false alarms incredibly easily. Since my apartment is new construction it has AFCI on every circuit. The TV also used to trip it and maintenance replaced that circuit’s breaker and it’s stopped, and I’d probably get the other replaced too if not for COVID requiring all our maintenance requests to be emergency-only.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc-fault_circuit_interrupte...

AFCI’s are such a horrific scam. Imagine spending thousands of dollars to fill a breaker box with less reliable breakers.

I had AFCI trip on my fridge after renovating my kitchen while we were away for a weekend and ruined the brand new floors when the ice box melted. So infuriating.

I’ve since pulled the AFCI’s out of all mission critical circuits and sold them on eBay.

Just an absolutely disgusting example of regulatory capture.

Here in San Francisco's Mission district the power used to go out every time it rained heavily (2-3 times a year for a period of 5 years or so.) Seems to have been fixed a year or so back. Heavy rain in SF isn't even all that heavy, though the roads do become almost impassable since they're not built with a gradient.

In other cities I've lived in power cuts were a once every two or three years thing and you could still drive on the roads when it rained.

I live in NY. We just got our power back after a three-day outage. We get short (a minute or two) outages a couple of times a year, at least.

PSEG...has their work cut out for them.

Wait... what? Tell us more about this 3 day outage in NYC?

Not NYC. Long Island. Tropical Storm went through on Tuesday.

PSEG spammed us with all these boasts about how they were prepared.

They weren't.

My power goes out all the time in Denver. In the summer, with no adverse weather. The grid here is a joke compared to most of Florida which is FAR more resilient.

A couple times per years sounds about right for California.

Few times a week in summer and twice or so weekly in winters here (India). It's not that uncommon in developing countries to have outages. Many of them are also arbitrary (not related to infrastructure failure) but saving cost, political reasons, social events, etc.

When our office was in Santa Monica, we'd get short (10 second - 2 minute) power outages several times per year (5-10 times), and real 1/2 day long outages about once or twice per year. Several days we were told to go work from home instead.

Canada here, metropolitan area. Power outages happen about once a decade, usually as a result of a wind storm. I have had zero server downtime due to power outages, but UPS / battery failures occur at about 4x the outage rate.

I have power failures a few times a week up to a few hours each time, living in a capital city of an European Union country. Having power failures a couple of times per year is "extremely infrequent".

I live in dominican republic, and power outages a few times a week are common.

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