Back after our Texas winter storm (storms actually)

[John Canfield]

Hi Winnies, we lost power for two weeks just getting it back Thursday. We had an ice storm, then sleet/snow, then another ice storm, repeat. Our small power co-op serves mainly rural locations and they estimated there were about 1800 poles down. As of yesterday they had 76 crews, mostly contractors, working on restoral. Several of my friends in the immediate area still don't have power.

It was an incredibly stressful situation - even walking the dogs and feeding our antelope in the ice and snow was difficult. Had my first how shower in the Horizon yesterday* but there are water leaks from the water heater area. Sigh. We didn't lose any animals but I was expecting to lose at least half of the herd. I started fattening them up about three months ago so they had good energy reserves. Found out I wasn't taking in enough calories as I lost 4.5 pounds in these two weeks (which I didn't need to lose.)

* Our Riannai tankless water heater for the stick house has a burst copper pipe in its heat exchanger - there are hundreds maybe a thousand of these in Texas with the very same issue. Once they lose power the little recirculation pump stops working and the water freezes.

It's going to be a week or two before I can check in here regularly like usual as I have a massive tree cleanup to do on our acreage. There's so much I need to hire some help.

 

[phil-t]

Hope your situation improves, John. I know what it's like - no fun.

 

[Isaac-1]

Glad you made it ok, we pulled through here mostly ok in western Louisiana, only lost power at our house in town a few times, and never for more than 5 or 6 hours at a stretch, we did have municipal water outages / extremely low pressure due to all the breaks around town for a few days, and had 2 pipe breaks under our house (house was built in 1902). Thankfully they were fairly easy to temporarily cap off until I find time to fix them, one went to an outside faucet, the other to a sink in a half bath, both were left dripping, but I guess not fast enough. No downed trees for us, we lost plenty of them last year in Laura and Delta, though a few on the vacant lot next door are sagging. This was the coldest temperature recorded here since just before our house was built, with lows of 9 to 11F in the area.

 

[John Hilley]

We went through the same thing in North Dakota and northern Minnesota in April of 1997. I only lost power for 4 days and didn't have any problems. We did have propane heat that didn't require any electricity. Our rural Co-ops had thousands of poles down. Right after the ice storm came a flood of the century. Grand Forks, ND and East Grand forks, MN were evacuated for about 6 weeks, about 50,000 people. I live 13 miles from the river, so personally wasn't affected. I spent a lot of time with two of my clients, the regional healthcare system Altru and power company that generates power for the co-ops, Minnkota Power. The power companies data center was taken out completely. We had it up and running a week later. My wife who worked for the University of ND , another woman and an IBM Field Engineer moved the data center from UND to NDSU 70 miles to the south. Didn't miss a single state payroll.

 

[John Canfield]

Wow John - that's a mega bad situation!

I'm still trying to get back in our pre-storm morning routine, sorry for a late reply. Our co-op still had almost 500 customers with no power as of yesterday but I suspect they are now working the most remote and difficult areas to access.

I have a ship date of April 7 on a replacement Rinnai tankless water heater, I have the heat exchanger burst pipe repaired and we have zero water leaks but the control board is fried. Looks like a transformer in the switch mode power supply let the magic smoke out. Zero chance of fixing the board since it's potted.

Two pix - one is my silver solder patch/repair of the heat exchanger. Soldering looks sloppy but the objective was to get the max amount of solder under the copper patch. The wire ties were there just to hold the copper strip in place while I soldered.

Second pix is the control board - RIP.

Bonus pix - my amateur radio antenna (SteppIR DB18E). I have it pretty much straightened out and replacement parts ordered.

Better stop here, don't want to get too far out there with social chitty chatty in the Winnebago board.

 

[X-Roughneck Strike 3]

John

Glad to hear you and the herd made it. I know this power mess it is not going to be as easy as getting rid of all the ERCOT board members or talking about it in the Texas State Legislature.

Reality is Texas prolly has a Full, "Go, Full Bore, Kamikaze", decade of modernization to the Grid before we get up to the year 2000, much less 2021. Those little Rural COOPs prolly got more "house cleaning" than that. Our Texas Power Grid is like the bridges in the USA I am going to make a guess.... Woefully neglected.

Sounds Like you might want to repair the Horizon and keep it as your Winter Plan B escape module.

It did get a little chilly at -1F here also. We got lucky and kept power thru the ordeal. Abilene a town of 100K plus water system totally froze up (No Gen Power Back Up) and the town and surrounding towns they supported went days with NO water at all.

Sending Mental Strength and Good Vibes to ya'LL down there. We are a long way from being where we need to be. Decades of neglect to deal with is reality.

JD

 

[John Canfield]

Thanks JD. I was running my chainsaw and tractor with grapple literally all day yesterday. I've made piles of trees/limbs/brush the size of small houses and a hot shower in the Horizon felt wonderful. For years we considered the Horizon our emergency backup but with the 4F and then 12F (and then 22F) morning temps it really needed to be winterized. I had a small heater running 7x24 in the plumbing bay and even had to turn it up because it was losing ground.

Now I'm wondering if I left the water heater on if that might have prevented burst plumbing there - I'll probably never know.

We store about 2500 gallons of water but no way to gravity feed from the large house tank due to a brain dead installer. The smaller tank gravity feeds stock tanks. My backup plan was to use a small bilge pump and battery to pump water into containers but to my astonishment the tanks were frozen except the inner core. Finally when I had the generator online the house tank hadn't frozen solid and we could use the pump in the tank. Phew.

Hope we never go through that again.

---edit--- I'm going to close this thread ----