During the last 48 hours we’ve had 4 power outages, the last one lasting almost 12 hours. And we may have more of them to look forward to.
It’s been interesting – and we’ve probably been more fortunate than most. We have lots of camping gear – and quickly found headlights, gaslights, space heaters etc., and even used the barbecue to defrost food from the freezer for dinner.
We even kept the internet up and running intermittently with a Power gorilla battery powering the Fritzbox ADS router – and used it’s wireless capabilities.
For the first 3 hours the UPS even kept most of our servers alive – not bad at all, but it eventually would run out of battery jounce, so we decided to shut the servers down gracefully.
But on top of that we had a good idea – as we have a gas fired central heating system. Unfortunately the gas heating itself works, but it will not heat the house without the circulation pumps being powered up by mains. So I disconnected both circulation pumps, found one of our other high capacity batteries capable of 12V – ran it though a small inverter to generate 200V and connected both pumps to this power source. Bingo – we had hot water and all the radiators started working again.
As today is December 25th it means that we have had a Christmas without any TV – we have actually spoken together!