Ophelia

[Flo]

Ah Maggie we'd be a busy board if we let the spammers in

Glad to know Tony is sort of OK - shame about his generator though.

[ina]

Good that's over for now. Glad to here everybody is OK. The worst we had of it was the fog Monday night...

[Odsox]

Yay, our electricity just came back on
Plus of course the Internet .... only to find that there is ANOTHER storm on it's way, although nowhere near so bad as the last one, but forecast to last longer. The weather people say 45 mph winds starting on Friday evening then 55 mph all day Saturday and finally dying down Sunday morning. Shouldn't be too much of a worry since we just got through 118 mph gusts but it might be interesting flying out Saturday morning.

I am amazed at my polytunnels, one especially had the full force of the wind on it's end, but didn't budge at all. Thankfully I suddenly thought on Sunday evening that it might be a good idea the screw lengths of planking across all the tunnel doors. Good job I did as all the latches/bolts had come undone and the doors would have swung open, and you can guess what would have happened next.
The greenhouses are all unscathed except the plywood vents in my big greenhouse, I'll take a photo of them later as it looks quite amusing. They were planned to be replaced anyway.

Now I need to buy a new generator sometime soon as another 8 hours with no electricity would have meant both freezers would have totally defrosted.

So that's the second "hurricane" I've survived as I was right in the middle of the '87 one when we were living in Kent.
Hopefully that's it.

[Flo]

Is the generator not able to be repaired? They costalot they do for good ones.

[Odsox]

Is the generator not able to be repaired? They costalot they do for good ones.

I don't know what's wrong with it Flo.
I think I will sell it for spares or repair, mainly as it is a big noisy unwieldy thing and it's an old fashioned standard alternator generator. When it worked well it made the lights flicker and upset computers and the TV, plus it's at least 25 years old.

I think I will get one of these small inverter generators that generate pure sine wave AC, the ones about the size of a small suitcase. I don't need a lot of power, just enough for lights and to keep the freezers going.
But more importantly I need something reliable.

[Flo]

Suppose that it owes you nothing then Tony. Just a shame that you found out in an emergency that it didn't work. There's a moral there somewhere.

Same as with me - the winds here blew polycarb sheets out of the cheapy greenhouse I was bought for Christmas two years ago. Found one sheet over the hedge five gardens up the road, one in my garden and a small piece in garden next door. Took the son-in-law 20 minutes to fettle it today. He'd kept all the spare clips from when he and a friend erected it (part of the present). In exchange he took away the wood that he didn't need for the fence he put up in the back garden 2.5 years ago (well it didn't blow down so the posts obviously weren't needed). That's firewood for the barge stove in his kitchen. Good old pallet wood fence that replaced the rubbish that was pretending to be a fence when I moved in here. The pallets were spares from some work he did.

Good test of the back garden. The allotments came through unscathed.

[Green Aura]

We've got one of the suitcase generators. A friend who moved away gave it to us. He rigged up a whole 12V lighting system for it but I don't remember him ever needing to use it other than to test.

Very compact with enough output to keep the two big freezers and a laptop or two going, maybe a lamp - or if it's very cold, the central heating pump.