Well, it looks like my letterbox on Alligator Point is toast.

Like Alligator Newburg avec toast points?

Not toast....oatmeal.

Update: *I* was very nearly toast! Michael was much stronger 40 miles inland than I -- or anyone else -- expected it would be. SWMBO was very worried for a while there. We watched through our windows as trees fell around our house. There's a dozen trees laying on the ground just off our back step, but zero damage to our house. We lost power for 9 days, only getting it back on Friday midday. That's too long, so 4 days in we drove down to Home Depot and bought a generator. Ran it two days using extension cords before managing to put together the hardware to wire it properly into the house's wiring system. The generator made life far more tolerable. Now that our power is back on, I get the fun job of preparing the generator for long-term storage.

Wow, sorry to hear you had such an ordeal. For some reason I thought you were in southern FL. Glad you both are ok. Now that you have the generator, hopefully you will never need it again !!!

Thanks for the update! I was wondering how you guys did through that. Glad to hear no home damage and glad you have power again!

Never having used a generator before, I am going to ask a stupid question...You use it when there is no power, so what are you running the extension cords from? And then when you said you wired it properly into the house's wiring system, how does it work if there is no power??

A generator produces power. Basically, unplug your TV from the wall and plug it into the generator instead -- but the generator has to be outdoors because it's a gasoline engine, if you bring it indoors the carbon monoxide will kill you and your family.

Generators are rated by watts. The one I got was 6500W, bigger than most. I appreciate that, because I needed to run my well which has a 2HP pump. 2HP requires about 2000W running, but about 3X that during startup, so 6500W was a good size.

I'll post a few other things learned about generators in separate posts. I dunno if the Florida page is the right place for this, but here goes.

Four days after the hurricane, Home Depot had plenty of emergency generators. Seriously, they were stacked in the aisles -- at a pretty good price, too. 6500W Generac or Ryobi units, $700 each. Each unit has four 120V receptacles and one 240V receptacle. Each generator comes with one power cord, but it plugs into one of those 120V receptacles. If you need to power something that runs on 240V -- like a well, so you can get some water in the house -- you need a NEMA L14-30P plug to fit the 240V receptacle on the generator -- and guess what Home Depot was sold out of! And so was everyone else in town. We were quite lucky to pick up the very last two at Lowe's.

You can set a generator in the yard and run extension cords into the house to power some lamps, a TV, things like that. You'll be tripping over extension cords, and you'll have to prop doors or windows open for the wires. And powering anything that's permanently wired into the house, like ceiling fans and lights, would require some tricky splicing.

The redneck fix: Forget about the extension cords. Plug a cable into the 240V receptacle on the generator, splice a dryer plug onto the other end, and plug it into the dryer receptacle. This backfeeds the main panel through the dryer breaker, which is typically a 30A 240V (duplex) breaker. Switch off all the other duplex breakers as those are the heavy loads that can overload the generator. Also switch off the main breaker, otherwise your generator can backfeed the transformer on the power pole which will step the voltage up to 14,400V and electrocute some poor lineman who thinks he's working on a dead line. But the generator will neatly power up all the light-duty circuits in the house, so you can turn lights and fan on and off and watch TV as usual.

Note: The cable needed to make that connection needs to be 10 guage, 4 conductor. Ideally an “SO” wire, meaning it's nice and flexible like an extension cord should be. It still looks more like a black garden hose, and the stuff costs more than $2 a foot. And it doesn't come prefabbed, you have to buy the plugs and the wire and assemble this thing.

SWMBO & I are at Lowe's trying to see what we can scrounge because they're sold out of a lot of stuff, and lo and behold there's this little old black lady standing beside us trying to buy the same things we're buying -- a dryer plug, a NEMA L14-30P plug, and a length of 10-4 wire. It was hard to imagine her putting this stuff to use, so SWMBO asked her about it. Sure enough, she had no idea what she was gonna do with it, she was just buying the stuff she was told she would need.

In our particular case, the dryer plug wasn't a good option; it's too far inside the house, and it's too difficult to pull out the dryer to get behind it. So instead I added an outlet near the breaker panel, and I used L14-30 connectors for it. It required purchasing a new 30A duplex breaker as well.

I finally understand why there are always long lines at the gas stations during crises such as this. You can store water, but you cannot store electricity. If you want your kids' video games to work, that generator has to be running. Many people we spoke with routinely run them 24 hours a day, apparently even filling the fuel tank without shutting it down (which is not recommended). At that rate, the generator will use nearly 20 gallons of gas per day. Nearly 60 bucks' worth. If you have only four 5-gallon gas cans, you need to go to the gas station *every day*. If you only have one or two gas cans, you'll be buying more of them -- Home Depot had stacks of those, too.

Also: The Owner's Manual says to change the oil every 100 hours. That means every four days at that rate.

I think we could get by with 4 hours a day, but SWMBO wants more than that so it's been running about 8 hours a day -- primarily at night when the lights are most welcome and we watch TV. During that time, we'd charge up the phone, refill the water buckets, etc.

Hurricane Michael ripped us a new one, and two days later we were in the midst of a heat wave. Temperatures around 90 in mid-afternoon, never dropping below 75 at night with 100% humidity. People are sleeping in their cars out front of the house with the engine running to keep the A/C going. A 6500W generator won't power the A/C in your house -- but it will power one of those little window units. So there has been a run on little window units. SWMBO & I have been making do with fans -- sitting right in front of us, turned on high speed.

Yikes....now I know all about generators! That they run on gas was really all I needed to know ;-)

Sort of glad I live in upstate NY where we never lose power. Just have to shovel snow. hmmm snow or no power.....

My sister lives in Elizaville, NY and when enough heavy snow gets on the power lines the've been known to snap and render her powerless. I would say you're very luck to never have lost power.

Sort of glad I live in upstate NY where we never lose power.

You do know, of course, that upstate NY is the location of the largest blackout in history?

I grew up in central NY state and we lost power every winter during a heavy snow storm. The good thing was we never lost refrigerated food because we could just stick it in a snow bank. We also became very creative using our gas grill to cook meals.

In CT, we lived at the end of a power line, where we could lose power if someone even blew at the wires. After losing power for a week or more at a time during Hurricane Sandy and the ice storm later that fall, we ended up putting in a standby whole house generator, which ran on a 1000 gallon propane tank. Best investment we ever made!

Now here in FL, we already have a 220 50V (?) plug on the outside of our house which we can plug our portable generator into if we lose power. Our new house will have the same once completed.

BB

It just so happens that my house has a main panel about 20 yards from the house, so I was able to put the 220V plug out there. That gets the generator a bit farther away -- a good thing, since they are noisy.

You can monitor the progress of the power company restoring power by going outside at night and listening for the drone of portable generators in the distance.

The generator I bought has a metal fuel tank. I saw a couple others in the back of somebody's pickup truck, and they had plastic fuel tanks. I wish mine had a plastic fuel tank! This thing is probably going to sit for years before I need it again, and it'd be good to have a fuel tank that doesn't rust.

I want to think that this post was funny, as I have monitored the power company's progress many times by just listening for generators.

Many hugs!
BB

My grandma in Buffalo was without power for several days one winter. They bought a full automatic generator after that, which cost several thousand dollars. But worth it for a 90+ year old lady's peace of mind, I guess.