Annoyed Thoughts: archive 1

If/when I wake up at 5, I’m up. There’s no going back to sleep.

Hour five without power, the novelty has worn off.

3 Likes

A particularly annoying power outage prompted me to start this thread.

2 Likes

You need one of those electric vehicles with a big battery

2 Likes

Or at least a mattress for my Y, put it in camp mode, boom.

The only time I want to be awake at 5 a.m. is to catch an early morning flight.

1 Like

Power came back! We made it 22 hours without power. This morning I bought the last 1.5lb of dry ice I could find. Had it not come back we’d be looking at throwing out a lot of food.

3 Likes

Dry ice for the fridge? We were traveling in a little fold-out camper a while back and threw a chunk of dry ice in the cooler because it was what we could find. We had some cantelope in the cooler, which was awesome in the morning - with a fizzy carbonation. Carbonated milk otoh isn’t good.

1 Like

and here’s the article in today’s NYT -

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/business/energy-environment/electric-vehicles-backup-power.html?unlocked_article_code=OJH8EMIt-EZCjyKMRHdXfrEWF7rpfAOeWRNOVCXV1x_kW7yMQZXH6K3V60MHk1_LAkwj51bIt-mHrtpdVLB2Wd96o9h4zCw39PZtwig4GefJtvhM2n5faQzUz7UXGGFBHwHJfeeiyneOJ2dPUVc2GeGu56G7CvIagCIuLkQu3kpuFbyUIiX4uuRjzLKaF86D-L0dcI87wy1-jucM6u-BVzW_FePpDTAtuukIiA0O1wzGZ5W3szWsh-w47-iJwCkUwMup2m0YU0kKUl_ezfSWH2IJB3qsES1J14xV81_gh1Bln53TSvZdjB3H6tGqvanJpL_VwPCVZxXf3CjPmqUucxq4o__SYhKqnB5ql8vA9qMIhuHFPk4SwkS_JP4&smid=url-share

3 Likes

I have friends who’ve been using their electric car as a backup power supply for years. They even plugged into the neighbor’s for a few hours daily to keep the neighbor’s fridge cool.

2 Likes

I got an offer to reinstate my zoom account for half price. I actually need to schedule a zoom meeting for a nonprofit I work with. It needs to be more than 40 min, so I am trying to take advantage of this offer. On my phone, it gives me the offer but doesn’t let me accept the offer. (I can’t see that portion of the page and it won’t let me shrink the page nor scroll.) on my work laptop, it won’t give me the offer. So I’ll have to wait until I get home and try my personal laptop.

1 Like

I went down too the basement to get some fish out of the pandemic freezer. It was cold, but not frozen. I checked the circuit breaker, and it had been tripped. These are the fancy new circuit breakers that don’t work.

The general contractor assures me that everything will be fine. I don’t believe him. I’m kind of freaking out.

1 Like

20 years of research down the drain. :slight_smile:
I have the same issue with downstairs fridge and freezer. They used to be on a shared circuit that tripped frequently, so I had a new dedicated circuit added for them, but the new circuit still has a GFCI on it that trips occasionally. I should add a smart device to notify me when it trips.

1 Like

It’s not the gfci, it’s the new fancy arc fault detection, that trips if you breathe near it.

Anything else plugged in on the circuit?

I don’t think anything is at the moment, although I’m not certain. But a carpenter had been working on the basement. I assume he plugged something in.

Are those required by code now? Any chance you can replace them? I naively expect different brands of electric infrastructure to perform to the same specs. Curious about whether the appliances you have on the circuit have a use profile that the AFD is sensitive to, and how that can be rectified.

They are, although i might be able to apply for an exception. The long-term problem is that one room is supposed to be a work shop, and i really will want to be able to use electric motors (which generate sparks internally, and so trigger the things) in that room.

But i already had to replace a basement fridge once because a circuit breaker flipped, and i didn’t notice in time. I also need some kind of a warning when that happens, even if i manage to get old-fashioned circuit breakers for the work shop.

Do you remember how, for something like a decade or two, if you replaced a toilet you were stuck with a low flow toilet that didn’t work? That’s where we are now with circuit breakers. The new ones are terrible. Yes, you are less likely to have a house fire, but you are also less likely to be able to use a vacuum cleaner.

There are now good toilets that meet the code. And maybe, someday, there will be good circuit breakers that have this function. Right now they are pretty flakey.

Well, crap. Is it worth trying to find a non-licensed handyman to install an old school breaker? The other option you mention is interesting, my sump pump beeps when the power goes out, and I assume there is some kind of device available that is just a beeper for when power gets cut.

Seems like an apt analogy, it did take like 20 years to catch up. And even now, I’m skittish on the 1.28gpf toilets, the last one I bought was a 1.6gpf Toto thing.