Suddenly I am OFF Grid

[SparWeb]

Came home last night to find the power was out...  Not a big surprise out in the country here.
Usual call to the power co...  It didn't take long to realize that there is power at the pole but it is not getting to the house!!
That was a surprise! 

So I have the house jury rigged with the ship to shore wire so the furnace works and the fridge is okay.
Going to need to hire a guy to trench a new wire from pole to house $$$

But for now I can say I have officially joined the Off Grid movement

[thirteen]

I came home after working all week out of town and someone needed to turn the corner not as fast as they did and there is two blocks without power. Maybe by sunday night. People are to used to using elect. for everything. A neighbor down three houses came up and asked it I could I could let him use my generator to power his house. I figured fine I could do that. I had done that for a couple of other people to keep their refrigerators and freezers working. When I got down to his house all his chubby kids were happy to see me. They had not played any of there games on their TV for two days and didn't know what to do. But there was a basket ball hoop outside and a trampoline(sp) golf clubs, a horseshoe pit and a dozen other things laying around unused and all they wanted was power for the games. I did not make a friend but went across the street to the older couple's house and let them use my generator for 4 hours. My type of justice.  I refused payment from them for the gas but the lady gave me a homemade peach pie. That's the way I like a thank you. I'll be off grid next year up at my house in the sticks. Hopefully in 364 days.

[TomW]

We used to have very poor reliability on grid power but they rerouted our feed from end of a meandering loop to right off the main line.

Last couple times the power went off we only knew it because the ceiling fan quit turning. Everything "in use" was on RE. We are far from "off ghrid" but on windy and sunny days we transfer a lot of loads to the RE with poor mans transfer switches (Plugs and Outlets). I have a mostly installed not wired 6 gang transfer switch installed in the house to eliminate the unhandy but very functional plug it in where you want system.

All from a system "mostly for fun" IE: Hobby 

Tom

[jaysicle]

Came home last night to find the power was out...  Not a big surprise out in the country here.
Usual call to the power co...  It didn't take long to realize that there is power at the pole but it is not getting to the house!!
That was a surprise! 

So I have the house jury rigged with the ship to shore wire so the furnace works and the fridge is okay.
Going to need to hire a guy to trench a new wire from pole to house $$$

But for now I can say I have officially joined the Off Grid movement

Was it actual cable failure from movement over time or something else?
Good that you are resourceful enough to have necessities covered. 

We have aerial drops for hydro in our survey. Sometimes I watch them sway when it gets windy.
That usually bothers me and I close the curtains so they stop swaying.

Did see some sparks one night while on the couch watching a show. For 1-2 seconds looked like someone welding at the top of the pole.
A metal cap shaped something had finally worked its way loose - and found what was left of that on the sidewalk the next morning.

We didn't lose power, but I am pretty sure root cause that night was that the curtains were open.

[ChrisOlson]

Came home last night to find the power was out...  Not a big surprise out in the country here.
Usual call to the power co...  It didn't take long to realize that there is power at the pole but it is not getting to the house!!

It's very unusual to lose both legs of a single phase service unless there's digging or similar going on and both legs got cut, or the transformer failed.  Even buried AL where a nick got in the insulation and there's a big white ball of corrosion at the break, in most cases I've seen, delivers full voltage to the panel bus with no load, then drops to a very low voltage when load is placed on the leg.

At any rate, welcome to the off-grid club.  I've been in your situation for 9 years this coming June 8th.
--
Chris

[hayfarmer]

went the off grid route cause the power coop where I live is well ...to sugar coat it ..(challenged)  .been here 30 years and have grid failures 6 - 10 times per year.that's not a typo.have a aerial power feed

wandering backwoods to my pole where my buried drop line feeds my home where there is a four way feed going thru other backwoods feeding more houses that don't prune trees causing the breaker switch

on my pole to trip. thinking I was smarter than the average bear I donated a right of way to the coop to bury a new feeder from my neighbors new buried sub division and up to my service pole so they

reverse feed the power. Problem is the breaker switch is still on my dip pole and zap,any trouble to the field kills my service too.that's why I went with a 240 v  auto inverter set up.I keep telling the tree Nazi's

pruning the trees off the power lines is a good thing.    3rd world power grid. 


hayfarmer

[SparWeb]

Hey guys.  Thanks for the ideas, too.
It was mostly a joke since my wife made a facebook update about being without power, so I grabbed her i-phone and made my own "status update"   

Saturday was difficult because we had company arriving, and apart from having to stop solving this problem to pick them up at the airport, all we had to offer at the house was the... ahem... latrine.   

Typical country house:  well pump, stove, dryer on 240V.  Both sides gone.  Once the wires were pulled out of the connector bars on the pole and the house end, I did some Ohm tests on both hot lines and the neutral and none of them show continuity!  Some kind of clean break or short underground.  The u/g wires are aluminum, 2 gauge or thereabouts, separate conductors, and the neutral doesn't have a shield.  There's also a ground with green shield that doesn't come back up the conduit at the pole! 

Anyway I'm pretty sure it's a mess underground and even if I try to pull the AL wires out of the conduit (assuming there IS conduit laid all the way) I worry that I'd just be pulling new CU wires into a broken conduit, ready to shift yet again.

No signs of anything going on above ground.  Have a clear line of sight from house to pole, just the driveway between.  No sink-holes, never excavated (not since I moved in 6 yrs ago at least).  It's quite a mystery! 

My first response Friday night was to rig up the extension cords from the inverter at the barn to the house.  That worked for a while (120V/30A) but couldn't draw more than 20 Amps.  It happened to be a very sunny and windy day, so the RE system had no trouble keeping up.  That came to an end when the inverter fuse blew because mother-in-law started the microwave while the fridge and furnace were both going.

Meanwhile I was hooking up a RV power outlet to the side of the house.  Something I've always been meaning to get a round tuit...  Well this was the day.  Pulled some armored cable under the house and up to the breaker panel, replaced the 100A breaker with a 50A breaker for safety.  That done I just had to start the Honda generator I'd borrowed from a friend.  No-go.  Gas, oil, spark plug, air filter, dammit nothing wrong but won't go.  I've personally used that generator many times and it chose now to give up.

Fine.  Scrounged a whole bunch of 3-gauge wire that had been set aside at work after a 3-phase service was replaced.  Enough to reach to the house + an extra conductor in case one wasn't any good.  Laid that along the ground from house to pole, took the plug off the cord I was going to use for the generator and put it on these fat wires (required some persuasion).  Hooked the other ends to the pole panel (pulling down the bad ones) and stood back...  Checked connections, found a fault, checked again, good to go.  Flipped the breaker and yay!   Lights back on.  More importantly, the WATER was back on!!!  Guests are more comfortable now.

I have a neighbour who is an electrician who can take a look at it tomorrow, and help figure out if the old wire can be saved or the conduit is bad, or if we just gotta dig it all up and lay a new line.

Note:  This is Calgary.  Ice on water even in May.  Some readers must think I meant to write "air conditioner" instead of furnace, but that ain't so at 51 degrees north latitude.

[ghurd]

Just an idea... if the trencher will be there anyway, might be time to consider running a line from the barn to the house?

The only thing worse than 'company that arrives in aircraft', is company that arrives in aircraft when the washroom is 'not operating under standard parameters'.
Good luck man.

I do speak fluent Canadian, so I said washroom instead of bathroom.   
G-

[ChrisOlson]

I have a neighbour who is an electrician who can take a look at it tomorrow, and help figure out if the old wire can be saved or the conduit is bad, or if we just gotta dig it all up and lay a new line.

Maybe your electrician friend has one of those underground broken wire leak detector things.  Three years ago we had a feeder break underground, that runs from the service panel for our 250 kW Cummins genset and feeds bins #3, 4 and 5 at our grain handling facility.  It broke where we had been driving over it with semis all winter.  The driveway being plowed, plus 80,000 lb trucks driving over it drove the frost down and it heaved in the spring and broke one leg of the three-phase.

My electrician came with a thing that plugs into the ground and to the wire in the service panel, then he walked around swinging a dongle on the end of a wire over the approximate place we knew the wires to be buried.  He found the break within one foot.  We had 2/0 AL direct bury wire in there, but we dug it up and put it in conduit where it runs under that driveway and he just spliced in new wire on both ends of the conduit.
--
Chris

[SparWeb]

Hi Chris,
My neighbour came over first thing in the AM, and we talked about just that.  But he explained the cost of getting the equipment, the time to do the test, digging up the bad spot, confirming it's the ONLY bad spot, installing the splice (or splices), and by the time the whole process is done it's taken just as long and cost just as much as digging up a new trench and laying a new cable!

So stuff the old wires, they can rot where they are.  Interestingly, when I started to dig around the pole I found ANOTHER abandoned wire.  That doesn't bode well!

I went to town right after he left, rented the ditch witch, dug the trench, and while returning the trencher, I snuck into the electrical wholesale store just 1 minute before they close the doors.  My electrician friend tracked down a good deal on armored three-conductor cable (ACWU for those who like to look these things up in books).  It can be directly buried, has a rubber jacket outside AND inside the shield.  All for less than I paid for the 8-gauge I put in the WT tower.  Sheesh.  It's who you know.

There are a lot of rocks in my soil, (as I learned with the trencher) so it's no wonder that over time settling earth sawed through the old USE cable.

The competing theory, which is backed up by the extra buried wire and the F***-up which is my water supply from the well (don't ask), is that there used to be a different house where my current house stands.  It doesn't square with the title deed which is dated only 1 year earlier than the house I live in, but it does explain a lot with just one fact.  Who knows...  Lots of bizarre things have been done to my house since it arrived, and I'm only a fraction of the way through fixing them.  Makes me wonder if it wouldn't be easier just to strike a matc-----  shoot, can't talk like that on a public forum!!!!  Insurance wouldn't pay if they suspect it's pre-meditated!

[SparWeb]

Just an idea... if the trencher will be there anyway, might be time to consider running a line from the barn to the house?

I agree, but time pressure is forbidding me from getting "distracted".  The ideal trench from tower to house would bisect a flagstone walking path, a tree, and back patio, therefore no easy way to dig that in a sunny afternoon.

Hey, the irony is NOT lost on me. 

Here I am posting all the drudgery details of getting RECONNECTED to the grid, on a forum dedicated to living OFF the grid!   

[ghurd]

Here I am posting all the drudgery details of getting RECONNECTED to the grid, on a forum dedicated to living OFF the grid!

Obviously, you are evil.   

G-

[ruddycrazy]

Here I am posting all the drudgery details of getting RECONNECTED to the grid, on a forum dedicated to living OFF the grid!   

Eh living where brass monkeys need to wear dacks to keep their family jewels intact and having a visiting mother-in-law and being OFF the grid where she says i'm cold put the furnace on and the reply is sworry the batteries are down. One can't blame ya for being on the grid.........

[TomW]

Just an idea... if the trencher will be there anyway, might be time to consider running a line from the barn to the house?

I agree, but time pressure is forbidding me from getting "distracted".  The ideal trench from tower to house would bisect a flagstone walking path, a tree, and back patio, therefore no easy way to dig that in a sunny afternoon.

Hey, the irony is NOT lost on me. 

Here I am posting all the drudgery details of getting RECONNECTED to the grid, on a forum dedicated to living OFF the grid!   

It helps reinforce the feeling that the grid is a major arse pain. Which some could argue is "good". 

Nice when it works, tho.

Grid is my reality. RE is my hobby!

Tom