Power Outages

[ernone]

Does anyone know why we keep having multiple hour power outages?  It was bad like this when I first moved here in 2001 and then it got a lot better.  Seems like every month now we're having two-four hour power outages.

Thanks for the info.

[The Admin]

To the best of my knowledge, both outages were caused by transformers that exploded. Both occured in the general vicinity of the 205/78 intersection. More then likely, the aging tranformers aren't handling the expanding load since the city if growing. I'm assuming this is only impacting the FEC customers as I've seen outages on the FEC customers yet the others that are on TXU were still fine, and vice versa. I believe Bently Farms is on TXU.

[ernone]

I hope FEC upgrades the grid soon then.  I'm seriously considering a standby generator for the house.  Anyone else looked into whole house standby generators?

[The Admin]

I've looked into this, but to do the whole house, your talking about the price of a small car. I'm still thinking about it, but I can't get the wife to agree. I've tried to convince her into getting a small one that can run some basic lights, etc, but even that was a no go :-) Actually, if I were to spend that amount of money, I may go solar power instead as that is something you can constantly use and slowly pays for itself over time. Unfortunately my house is all electric, so going completely solar is out of the question. However, I could power the whole house via solar with the exception of the major appliances.

[The Admin]

On a related note, I would HIGHLY recommend placing all your electronics on surge suppressors and UPS's where applicable. I've lost a couple of misc items in the past couple of years due to surges and brown outs.