Mallie Lennon / Eufaula, OK
Rev. Jan 21, 2001
Power Outage
By Mallie Lennon
I recently had a 15 day
power outage at my house. I managed to survive with out loosing any frozen
food or letting the house get cold. I used my generator
to fire a friends gas furnace once a day to keep his house livable.
I also helped several friend wire generators. In the process I learned
a few things. It was simple enough to take a piece of romax, wedge it in
each prong of an extension cord, then into an outside receptacle.
Of course this was done after the main was off, and all the breakers in
the box. The one breaker that went to the used receptacle was turned on,
feeding one side of the bus far. This allowed me to power any circuit that
was on the same leg. This would give me a fifty percent chance it
would power furnace. If not, changing receipts probably would. This
was a quick and easy way to power a gas fired furnace. I could feed the
other side of the bus with low voltage by just turning on the electric
cook stove oven. It was very low voltage, so only used it for lights. In
some cases I could access an outside 220v circuit, with either a sub panel
or a receipt. If the generator was 110v, I could tie the two legs
together to power both sides of the bus bar, without having to worry about
the generator being over loaded with a 220 appliance.
After 7 days, my nephew
got his electricity restored, so he let me use his welder/generator with
8k 220. I used two mobile home life lines tied in the middle, giving
a three prong plug on each end. I plugged into the generator, and
into a receptacle I had in the garage. At last we could use the elect
clothes dryer, and the electric cook stove. We would turn it off at bed
time, and fire it up again in the morning. It would be turned off again
in the after noon for a couple of hours, and then run until bed time again.
I averaged running the generator 12 hours per day. I monitored the temperature
of both refrigerators, and it never got above 45 degrees. I thought about
turning the temperature down on the refrigerators to give a little more
coast time, but it was not necessary. No frozen food thawed. It was
the final convincing point for me to decide to use a home refrigitor in
the conversion. Now I know it will not have to be powered all the time.
I was glad I had used super insulation when building my house. The temperate
never got below 65. The price of LP and Natural have both doubled in the
last 2 month, so we are continuing to turn the furnace off at night.
We used a LP fish
fryer burner on our enclosed back porch to cook on for a week. Had eggs
and bacon for breakfast, stews, chili, beans, and etc for dinner,
and the wife even made cornbread on the burner in a skillet. I think I
may keep Her.
Mallie Lennon / Eufaula, OK
MC-8
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Rev Jan. 21, 2001
