Power Out
July 29th, 2012Update: Power Is On Again
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We’re getting slammed by a storm and the power is out again. I’ve just trained myself to routinely put my Fenix PD32 in my pocket when it rains hard out here. haha. Anyway, you know the story: If there are no updates, it means the electricity is still out.
If you lived closer, I’d ship you some UPSs and loan you a generator. 🙂 I’d dare say that shipping would cost more than they are worth.
Thanks, I’m already running two UPS units.
Re: generators: I’ve thought about getting one, but the noise they make drives me nuts. In the over six years I’ve lived here, I think the power has only been out for more than 24 hours once. But I hear those UPS relays clicking a couple of times per week at least. Incredibly, most people don’t use UPS systems on their computer gear here.
Actually, here in the “Sunshine State”, we’re pretty much guaranteed short power outages any given afternoon for about half the year. Most people just complain when their power goes out. 🙂 When we have hurricanes blow through, there’s always a risk of being without power for days to weeks.
Our generators are loud. The cheap ones are air cooled, and run at about 3k RPM. The better ones are water cooled and run much slower. The better ones are quiet, but expensive.
There are ways to mitigate the noise though. Since you have some property, you could build a small bunker to keep it in. Basically, a dirt structure, with a wood cover to protect it from rain falling in.
You’d want to have something like a 4″ drain pipe running under the base, in case any rain water does end up inside it.
The wood cover should be inclined, to reflect the sound away from the house.
Most of the sound would be absorbed by the sides of the bunker. The rest will go up, and reflected by the top.
I tried to go a different route with one of mine. I build fiberglass insulated sides, and put an automotive muffler on it. The exhaust wasn’t loud, it was the engine itself. Since I only insulated 4 sides, it still echoed off the concrete it sits on, and the fuel tank mounted on the top. Since it still needs air, either I could build a more complex structure, or live with the noise. 🙂
But hey, with just the occasional power problem, it’s probably an investment you don’t need to make.
I’ve thought this one through long ago: definitely not worth it. I can hear my neighbor’s generator if I go outside some nights when her batteries have run low. She lives hundreds of meters away over a hill and down a valley. That’s plenty of generator noise for me.
Well, trees, walls, and (obviously) hills, can deaden sound. If you use trees or bushes, it usually takes a fairly dense group of them. I don’t know what your options are out there for doing construction, but they exist.
Where I was growing up, we planted acres of pine trees. It was a lot of work, and took several years to grow up, but once they did, we didn’t hear cars on that road.
In one of the houses I’ve lived in since, there was a simple concrete block wall. It was only about 4 feet above the ground by the road, but by the houses it reached to about 6 feet above the ground. We couldn’t hear cars. We could hear big trucks, if their exhaust pipes went higher than the wall (like tractor trailers)
The whole thing to it is to put an obstruction between your ears and the sound source.
If you can get them to put a wall closer to their generator, it will obviously be much cheaper. Building a dirt birm noise barrier can be done with a shovel and some grass seed. 🙂 They’d probably only need to make it 3 feet tall, and just as wide, rather than one 6 feet tall and the width of your property.