recent power outage in Medway

I live in Hempstead in Gillingham, Kent.

Storm Eunice caused an outage here when a tree fell on power lines cutting just this district. This lasted for 48hrs and consequently I was without light or heat for that time. Over two days the house temp. dropped to 12.3c and the outside temp. was 10.1.c

To say the least I was hypothermic with outside clothes on and wrapped in a blanket I was shiverering. Getting out of bed in the morning was iceberg cold!

Now I am looking at some form of heating, I have no fireplace, no gas fire. only central gas heating.

What can I do if this happens again, I went out and bought a gas cylinder and burner to boil water so I had hot drink and soup but not really satisfactory.

Dog loved it as she likes the cold! At 85 years of age I feel the cold.

Unrelated, but I live in the other Gillingham. No matter how many times I write "DORSET NOT KENT!" on ebay auctions, I still get people grumpily telling me that I should have told them the items I am selling are in the "other" Gillingham.

You can still buy new calor gas SuperSer style portable gas heaters, very useful for spot heat and the bottle lasts longer than I expected. I saved a few quid by getting hold of an empty bottle secondhand which I was then able to trade for a new full one from the agent. I'm sure someone will tell me its illegal and I'm going to hell.

Edited By Jon Lawes on 21/02/2022 08:34:26

Edited By Jon Lawes on 21/02/2022 08:34:44

My comiserations Clive. Maybe Machine Mart is a good place to start, they are always banging on about their heater range.

**LINK**

It's either that or build a forge or foundrey and move in there

regards Martin

As a standby for heating, mobile domestic gas heaters that use the large butane cylinders contained within them are good, particularly those that are catalytic in operation because they have no open flame, thinking of your dog there getting too close to an open flame and getting singed. When we lived in Cornwall in the 70’s we had to rely on these for our heating as the electric heaters provided were too expensive to use, the only problem is that the major combustion product is water vapour but for occasional use of a few days is something you can live with. The major manufacturer of these type of heaters used to be Calor but nowadays there are plenty of continental makes being sold. Remember when we came back from a month away in Australia, it was January and temperature was -5 C, it took two days with the central heating on full blast to warm the house to an acceptable level this despite having programmed the heating to come on for an hour a day while we were away. I hate being cold, I spent my childhood in the Far East so used to warm temperatures. Dave W

Hi Clive i understand how you feel but you can register with your local council ,power company . and water company as being at risk and you will get help in ling outages .I am diabetic and have to keep insulin in the fridge and if the power is going to be off for any length of time they will set a small genny up to run the house. All you need to do is ask local council or even through you GP and that shoud get the ball rolling. Hope this is some help to you all the best Graham.

Another alternative for space heating might be one of the cheap chinese diesel fuelled hot air ‘parking’ heaters. They need a 12V power supply - a car battery will suffice if charging facilities are available - of 10A for about 3 minutes and 1-3A when running. People install them in conservatories and home offices. I am now warming my workshop with one when needed. Cheap to run and no real fuel storage issues.

Free standing and completely self operating gas heaters such as ‘super Sers’ are the obvious choice for most - portable, as well.

If on a natural gas supply, the cooker hob turned on may be sufficient to keep the chill off.

Yet another alternative is a decent sized generator to power the house, or some parts of it. Large enough to boil a kettle or run a small induction hob or cooker ring would be good. You need a fairly large generator to start inductive loadings like fridges and freezers. My diesel genny will provide 3kW all day long (but is even more noisy when all around are sitting in silence and/or near darkness!).

Even the smallest generators will provide enough power for an electric blanket or similar.

What could be even worse is no power and living on a flood plain - when evacuation is areal possibility.

We arrived in Hastings on Friday and the power was already out. Luckily it was only for a few hours.

Good luck. Plenty of options but they all need financing for the occasional outage (yet another ‘100 year’ storm).

I’m ‘belt and braces’. Battery back-up, some DC solar generation, generator, large water pump (not needed where we live), long, heavy duty extension leads, etc.

So Clive wants to run a gas boiler in an electric outage. Assuming the gas is flowing, use a car battery and an inverter to run the gas boiler and pump - even better with a leisure battery. Simple enough circuit to isolate the boiler power supply.

Elsewise, find a cheap hotel that accepts pets outside of the outage area? Why suffer ?

Bob

+1 for the butane heaters, I have a 20 year old one for emergencies, it lives in the garden shed in the summer and gets put in the house during winter. I always keep a couple of full gas bottles for it so it’s always ready to go. We are fortunate to have an open fire in the living room and I keep a supply of coal ready just in case.

We used to get lots of power cuts, just ours or half a dozen houses until a couple of years ago, the lights were flickering all day so I phoned SSE and they sent an engineer round to check our supply, they discovered that we had no neutral, just live and earth, immediately they turned us off and traced the fault to their cable in the road, a generator arrived and we were on that for three weeks while they dug loads of holes all down the road. Cannot complain about the service from them except perhaps that they took away my 100 A fuse and replaced it with a 60 A even though I complained. They assured me sixty amp supply was more than enough.

Another + 1 for the portable gas heater. My brother in law has one for his only heating in his small flat. He changed the Bottle last week & i think it was £38. It's not cheap but at least an alternative in emergencies.

Steve.

When we bought our new cooker (LPG) I made sure it didn't need electricity in order to ignite - came in very useful in our 24-hour power outage, along with having an open fire in the sitting room.

I was recently told by my supplier that Calor are no longer supplying new bottles, just replacing ones you already have. Has anyone else encountered this, or is it just local to west Wales ?

12 degrees is a tropical paradise in jockville, no hat or gloves required, 8-9 is a comfy work temperature and as long as you keep doing stuff you're fine

Below 5 is when it starts to get nippy, so hoover the house to warm up first thing in the am

Where I'm at it goes UP to 12 degrees lol

As far as warm is concerned go fleecy hat and jacket and gloves and those snood things are brill for the neck

Edited By Ady1 on 21/02/2022 10:04:35

Rurally we get occasional powercuts and with borehole and freezers etc it can be a problem. First I bought a small 2Kw silent inverter suitcase generator but it was heavy enough for OH to have trouble lugging it and fitted with modern circuits it failed to cope with the start-up back EMF from the borehole pump even though a borrowed old style 2KW genny had handled it fine. In the end i swapped it out for a new Wolf 7KVA electric start jobbie on wheels which actually cost about the same as the first suitcase size thingy. We end up with daisy-chaining extension leads, but it happily handles borehole, 3 freezers, 1 fridge, the router and PC's and could play swapsies with choice of electric kettle or microwave or a hotplate. Annoyingly access to the boiler electics is too awkward to be worth the bother - on the to-do list.
Being cold and old is a miserable combination so if budget can stretch and you’ve got somewhere to keep it then I highly recommend a big enough genny for the job. Looking on ebay there are some electric start jobbies in the 9.5KVA size for less than £600 notes that could run a couple of electric fires if needs be. Or go the whole hog and get an isolator switch installed so you can plug it into some house circuits.

pgk

There is something of a bottled gas shortage at present - for Calor in particular, to the point that it was mentioned on the local (West Yorkshire) TV news last week. One Calor distributor interviewed said he had a waiting list of 1000 customers ! Other suppliers (Energas, Flogas) may not be as badly affected, but are probably experiencing increased demand due to Calor's problems.

The diesel heaters mentioned by NDIY are good & the Chinese versions are pretty cheap (from £70-ish) - lots of hot air at reasonable fuel usage (around 100cc / KwH) on diesel, parafin or equivalent heating oils. They do need the exhaust to be vented outside, though, and the exhaust pipes get very hot. I have a 5Kw version in my garage / workshop running off a 12v power supply, with the exhaust taken through the concrete block wall - a non-contact thermometer shows the exhaust pipe at the point it connects to the heater running at around 200 degrees C.

The diesel heater does have the advantage of not generating condensation in the space being heated, unlike the self-contained gas versions, but has the disadvantage of needing more care / thought with installation to be safe.

For emergencies, a small camping radiant gas heater running off disposable bottles may be an option - not the cheapest to run due to the cost of the disposable bottles, but compact, lightweight & radiants heat what is in front of them (you) not the air around them.

Nigel B.

That's a nationwide thing.

So they don't want any new customers !?

Long power cuts are a problem because many UK homes are almost 100% dependent on electricity:

• Gas central heating needs electricity for the controller, pump and diverter valves.
• Hands free telephones need electricity for the base station
• Cookers, fridge/freezers, Immersion heaters, microwave, kettles, electric heating systems and lights all fail.
• Many battery powered devices use secondary batteries that need to be recharged with mains electricity
• Connecting to the internet needs a mains powered router.
• DAB Radios are usually run on mains because they tend to eat batteries.
• etc, etc!

Power cuts are particularly problematic in cold weather for the infirm who cannot warm up by moving about or are on blood thinning medication.

My Storm Eunice power-cut started at 11:45 and lasted 8 hours. Didn't bother breaking out my emergency camping stove and light. I read a book until it got too gloomy at about 16:30, then ate a cold collation and went to bed. Not too cold because Eunice wasn't a below zero storm. I slept until the power came back on and set off all the local burglar alarms. Dithered a bit about getting up and went back to sleep instead!

My cave-man response was OK for an 8 hour cut, but it's made me think about next time!

Bad weather more often is a consequence of Climate Change, which is why the world is seeing record breaking and severe weather events in quick succession. The UK sets standards for construction and emergency response on the basis of 1 severe weather event per century. This risk based approach allows, for example, houses to be built on a flood plain provided the countermeasures will, on average, work 99 years out of 100. All infrastructure projects take this risk based approach and the likelihood and impact of storm damage is calculated from historic weather data. Big problem! Climate change means historic data can't be trusted to predict the future will be like the past. Climate change is causing once in a century events every decade or less. The theory suggests the effect will get worse and so far the evidence is tracking the theory, not the wishful thinking of climate change deniers.

Given the risk of being effected by flood, wind, snow, and extreme cold or heat is rising, I think I need to up my game. Flood is unlikely at Duffer Towers, but storm winds over 90mph are likely to remove tiles. Over 100mpg could remove the whole roof! The only answer to cataclysmic damage is to evacuate. I should be OK assuming family with 30 miles aren't also homeless, but I ought to make sure the house insurance and other important information (like bank passwords!), are safe and handy for an emergency exit! Perhaps spare pants and a toothbrush. (Note to Americans - pants are underclothes! The outer garment are trousers. )

Managing a long power cut is more difficult, especially if you can't drive outside the crisis area. My local supermarkets all depend on electricity and communications to run the freezers, lighting, tills, and computer system that does restocking. So does the village shop. I would have to rely on the Nanny State to ship in food, water, medicines and other essentials.

Short term cooking and light is easy enough : camping equipment! Heating is harder, I have no fireplaces. Radio news yesterday mentioned several house fires caused by folk running barbecues and candles indoors. Gas and paraffin heaters have always been a fire and monoxide poisoning hazard, so engage brain before using. Can the heater be knocked over, is it safe to run unattended, and where do the fumes go?

For me the jury is out on standby batteries and/or an emergency generator. Batteries go flat! Ideally, a generator should connect to the mains and power the whole house as normal, but this is tricky to do safely. The alternative is a temporary chain of sockets into which lights and essential appliances can be plugged. At the moment there's no easy way of me connecting to an outside generator in cold weather, or setting one up in the middle of a storm.

Needs more thought. Time to apply the British Army's 7Ps rule: 'Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance'. Or maybe I'll cross my fingers and hope the disaster happens to someone else!

Dave

I remember camping with a clay plant pot inverted over a candle. You could burn your hand if you touched it.

Roy

Temporary thing by the look of it. Calor's website says:

We’re currently experiencing gas cylinder availability issues due to higher demand, restricted supply, global shipping disruption and ongoing resource challenges. Availability is evolving constantly but please be aware that some cylinder sizes are temporarily unavailable or limited to the exchange of an empty cylinder only.

Judging by their online ordering system, they should say most cylinder sizes are temporarily unavailable, not only some.

Dave

have a look at a small generator and an extention lead . A small 500w will probably run your centralheating provideded its not permanently wired and you can access the plug . The fourstroke models are very quiet and not overly expensive unless you buy a Honda . The diesel Cab heaters are good I use opne in my workshop / garage but you need to run the exhaust through a wall to out side and you still need a decent battery and charger . Probably a lot of fuss for an occassional outage. The propane gas heaters create some condesation but for an occasional outage shouldn't caus too much of a problem.

Stay safe and try to keep warm.