• Scam Alert. Members are reminded to NOT send money to buy anything. Don't buy things remote and have it shipped - go get it yourself, pay in person, and take your equipment with you. Scammers have burned people on this forum. Urgency, secrecy, excuses, selling for friend, newish members, FUD, are RED FLAGS. A video conference call is not adequate assurance. Face to face interactions are required. Please report suspicions to the forum admins. Stay Safe - anyone can get scammed.
  • Several Regions have held meetups already, but others are being planned or are evaluating the interest. The Ontario GTA West area meetup is planned for Saturday April 26th at Greasemonkeys shop in Aylmer Ontario. If you are interested and haven’t signed up yet, click here! Arbutus has also explored interest in a Fraser Valley meetup but it seems members either missed his thread or had other plans. Let him know if you are interested in a meetup later in the year by posting here! Slowpoke is trying to pull together an Ottawa area meetup later this summer. No date has been selected yet, so let him know if you are interested here! We are not aware of any other meetups being planned this year. If you are interested in doing something in your area, let everyone know and make it happen! Meetups are a great way to make new machining friends and get hands on help in your area. Don’t be shy, sign up and come, or plan your own meetup!

Power failures pick the worst time, without fail

BTW, this is what the winds did last night to a house beside a friend of ours in Sooke on Vancouver Island.

TreeOnHouse.jpg
 
Ouch! Hope the building was the only thing damaged - not the inhabitants.

We lost power from about 8:00PM ish to 1:00 AM Ish, and a few branches came down with no damage. No big deal.
But seriously, don't you all come here to retire in Victoria. It's an ugly rainy nasty hellhole. Terrible place. Stay away. Yes, you. Really.
Yup. After 20 some years in Victoria with a short break elsewhere, we left for further up Island. Vic was getting to be too much like GTA traffic (and driver!) wise. But other parts of the Island are ...Quite tolerable...

My (incomplete and perhaps erroneous) understanding of the power outage problem is largely that when North America started to become electrified, it was simplest to string wires on power poles, and even if someone thought about putting them underground the insulation technology wasn't there yet. If you look at newish subdivisions they pretty much all have underground electrical supply, and any power failures tend to be limited to somewhere outside that local system and feeding in. Switching over to underground at this point apparently costs more than the cost of fixing broken lines after every storm, but perhaps with increasing weather events that calculation will be re-visited.
 
As if the power outage isn't enough, we were fat, dumb and happy watching tv and then the batteries in our backup, packed up and died. At least the genny is still running and new batteries are on order.

We were out of power for about 40ish hours.
How big a set of batteries in the backup?
 
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