Hilarious. I was about to post to this thread similarly to what I'm writing now but the power went off for about 30 seconds while I was writing it yesterday. Trees fell all around my neighborhood but our lines are underground. People to the south of me had tree fall on their driveway and cars - minimal damage if any but they were stuck until about 6pm yesterday.
Here's a post to the topic I started to get people aware of this situation not too long back.
http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...readid=1255645
Luckily I'm in a spot in town that had power nearly the entire time. We had two distinct brief (<10sec) outages and a few dimming events which caused some of my PH's to chatter as they restarted. But nothing to worry about.
I did turn off my lights and the extra powerheads as I didn't want any unneeded stress to the grid or to my equipment/tanks.
Personally, I finally got my 1000W inverter for christmas and luckily before all of this opened it up to find it came with no way to connect to a battery. I found a pair of cables for a smaller inverter left over and was able to modify them and test it out in my garage first on the dremel used to modify them and second on a 1000W radiant heater I was using in the garage. Didn't wait too long for the heater to start glowing red but long enough to feel heat coming from it. Thing was when I turned on the heater, my truck engine idle took a big drag downward as the alternator must have been suddenly full on. Good thing to note. So I've checked that my extension cord goes from the inverter located in the garage from the nearby truck to my tank and decided which components I will run. Further, with this storm coming I ensured both my families vehicles were full of gas. Luckily, I have had power nearly the whole time.
That being said I feel for everyone who doesn't. We drove down to the Saturday Market downtown and probably only about 15% of the venders were there around 10:30am. Further, I was surprised to see so many traffic lights out and therefore, home areas that were still without power. So many of us even with gas heat have electric HVAC fans and electric igniters now so that's out. I bet there was a run on generators and inverters as well as gas heaters this week.
Sorry Dan and Mellisa that you had to work so hard last night trying to keep fish warm. I remember when I lost power for three days but my tank stayed alright - I spent quite some time turing water and keeping it warm. Similar wind event - power down everywhere.
Again, I highly recommend people consider their investment in their hobby (livestock) and consider how much it would cost to have a standby energy source - even it if it is something as simple as battery powered bubblers. You've got too much time, energy, and livestock to loose in an event like this.
Good luck until the power comes on for everyone!
