Potential Power Outages

Jerry,
On this 7 kw inverter gennie, are most of your appliances propane? Stove, water heater,  dryer? Are you using just 120 volt circuits?

Yes.  Propane heat, cooking, clothes drier and water heater.  The genny is a Honda EM7000is.  Not as quiet as the EU series.  I use 240 30A so the whole house gets powered.

We've got a pellet stove (Enviro Mini) to heat our main floor and a direct vent propane heater (Rinnai) for the (smaller) lower level. Pellet stoves are pretty nice if you've got a generator.

My generator only powers selected circuits, but the only things of importance that it doesn't cover are the 240v appliances, which for us is just the clothes drier and range. We can do without those for many days in a row if need be...

  Got home from work Thursday(Yesterday 10/10) morning and our Genny was singing the praise of power.  Great, no idea when power was shut off, (Sometime between Wed 17:30 hr and 0830hr Thursday) Friday afternoon when I got up power was restored.  I Fear now, that when PG&E hears a bat fart, creating a breeze there gonna kill power!  It's going to suck having to deal with power loss now every time wind blows!  Winter time we expect outages living in a redwood forest from natural occurrences IE trees falling, limbs taking lines down the occasional drunk taking out a pole etc.
  Now we have to contend with breezy day's?  How about, instead of awarding top PG&E execs with millions in bonuses,(For what I don't know) how about maybe updating transmission lines? infrastructure?
  Got nothing but respect for the linemen and the work they do. This isn't a bash against them.

They're already talking about the possibility of another round of outages on the weekend of Oct. 20th due to forecasted fire winds again.

PGE pulls this stunt too many times, it may just backfire and voters will opt for converting to a municipality.  SMUD was formed that way.  PGE didn't have the choice; once voters decided to go Muni, the law states the utility must sell their assets and turn it all over.  Yolo/Davis wanted SMUD to annex them a few years back, but current SMUD rate payers didn't see anything in it for them and voted them down.  SMUD did annex in Folsom a long time back and the extra cost was absorbed by the Folsom rate payers in the form of a surcharge until the infrastructure was paid off. I bet the town of Folsom was sure glad they weren't under PGE last week. 
In the meantime, hedge fund managers, biting at the bullet to get at PGE, won an important court ruling allowing them to deal immediately and without delay with current bond holders of PGE.  Their goal; to buy controlling interest in PGE during bankruptcy by offering the highest bid to bond sales, then breaking apart the company and selling it piece by piece/ asset by asset.  PGE is way too big anyways and has repeatedly demonstrated they can't successfully manage it to the benefit of the rate payers AND shareholders both.  And since money ALWAYS wins out, the ratepayers only option is to vote 'em out with a muni buyout.  Or wait for hedge fund managers to break 'em up.  Or move.  Lots of folks are making noises about moving, this being the last straw in a litany of state actions that attack business and traditional homeowner residents. 

Good analysis Jerry. I think that the future of electric power may be in self contained systems for individual properties. Needed is a power source, which exists with solar, and a power storage system which exists in lithium battery technology but at this time too expensive for the average home owner. I to live in a rural area and have a generator capable of powering the 240 volts needed for my well pump as well as running juice to the house but it is noisy and is shut off at night. A quiet, reliant non PGE source would be a delight.

I've got solar and it's sized to completely offset my annual usage but only when interfaced with PGE where I can bank the power.  I've priced out batteries and, for between $8,000 and $10,000 I can have a stack that would cover me in the summer/sunny months and still back feed PGE to bank for winter, but most importantly, would cover my needs during extended outages when the sun is shining, like the most recent and most likely foreseeable outages that are deliberate.  Sounds pricey until you price out a whole house genny installed with permits and auto cut AND that it's UPS, meaning I would not see even a hiccup if there was an outage.  Looking into it this winter when I have more time to study the proposals when I'll be sending RFP's to vendors. 
If I had a battery stack of, say, 20Kah, that would cover me and any possible loads I could think of.  Most recent proposal was for Tesla batteries.  I'm partial to US company options over Chinese. 

A quiet, reliant non PGE source would be a delight.

Amen to that.

Unfortunately, our little half acre in the woods doesn't get much sun---the big fir trees and redwoods are great, but, sadly, solar does not seem to be an option...

 
  Just an FYI,  My whole house generator isa Generak 9.5Kw system took them maybe 4 weeks for permits once we agreed to purchase a system They did everything!  The salesman sold us a 7.5Kw sysyem but when foreman came for his look at property he upsized the system to 9.5 Kw at no extra fee! We were able to 0 % finance for 12 mo. $5800
  Wife paid it off before tbe 12 mo was up😊
  I recall us talking about getting one 10 years back, but money was tighter then and prices seemed out of reach.
   Ours uses propane.  And during this last round, i noted our tanks guage.  Running the  thing over night the 2 night dropped tank 2%
  For you new home owners  I recommend you give them a call have them come out do a site eval.  Wont cost anything. Dont wait 10 years like we did.
Troy
  Solar is not a household option for me here either.

 

  Just an FYI,  My whole house generator isa Generak 9.5Kw system took them maybe 4 weeks for permits once we agreed to purchase a system They did everything!  The salesman sold us a 7.5Kw sysyem but when foreman came for his look at property he upsized the system to 9.5 Kw at no extra fee! We were able to 0 % finance for 12 mo. $5800
  Wife paid it off before tbe 12 mo was up😊
  I recall us talking about getting one 10 years back, but money was tighter then and prices seemed out of reach.
   Ours uses propane.  And during this last round, i noted our tanks guage.  Running the  thing over night the 2 night dropped tank 2%
  For you new home owners  I recommend you give them a call have them come out do a site eval.  Wont cost anything. Dont wait 10 years like we did.
Troy
  Solar is not a household option for me here either.

 

I'd just add that a DIY install of a standby generator/automatic transfer switch is possible, and should cut the price about in half. We (meaning "I") installed ours, and we spent less than $3k total, and that includes a longer run of wire to the generator than is typical (read, expensive, heavier gauge copper). Also, prices of generators have come down some since then, so it would be a little cheaper for a comparable setup today.

If I could find something significantly quieter at a reasonable price, I might upgrade. But, the generator is still going strong after 10+ years and many hundreds of hours of operation, and I expect it's got a lot of life left in it. Other than oil changes (and one minor warranty issue when first installed), we've only replaced the automatic voltage regulator (AVR), which cost $60 and was a super easy DIY job.

One of the nice things about propane is how well the oil stays clean.  No gasoline blow-by to contaminate it I'm told.  Mine ran 52 hours on a fresh oil change and today the oil looks as clean as the day I put it in.  Compared to 52 hours on the gas genny I loaned my neighbor, the gas genny's oil was quite dark and due to be changed now. 
The exhaust pipe inside looks brand new as well, where-as the gas genny looks dark and has soot coating it. 
Not to mention that propane never gets stale or old like gasoline can when stored for more than a few months.  Store propane for years, doesn't hurt it.