Things could be worse soon. People could not pay their house notes because of Harvey - http://www.marketwatch.com/story/te...eir-mortgages-in-the-coming-months-2017-08-30
My parents have a whole house natural gas generator. If the power goes out, they have no issues with running the central air and other things simultaneously.
Things could be worse soon. People could not pay their house notes because of Harvey - http://www.marketwatch.com/story/te...eir-mortgages-in-the-coming-months-2017-08-30
Sorry.
Wall of text. I forgot half of what I read.
I'm kinda stupid like that.
College has been a real pain in the butt for me.
And even then, you probably can't power anything else but the A/C I'm guessing? Yeah, I just don't really see the point of a generator - at least not in my area of hot-as-balls texas. Yay, I can have A/C in my house... but I can't do anything else weeeeee. Seems pointless and like I said, if it's for a long period of time I would say screw it and live with a family member in the next city over or something.
Realistic assessment!You have huge city of millions of people with the likes of a $200k home that make bare minimum payments... so they have a $195k mortgage - their house floods, they didn't have flood insurance (because they are fucking retarded) and now they have $0 property value and a $195k mortgage loan. Let's be honest, none of them will be paying.
Realistic assessment!
Bankruptcy attorneys will probably be seeing a lot of new clients . . and FICO scores MAY reflect poor choices (the 80% without flood insurance).
I guess I don't see how great generators are.... Because no matter what a generator will never be enough. If it's summer here in Texas I would need my A/C minimum, and what else can you honestly use it for? Cooking is about all I can think of?
Unless the power is out for 2 months (doubtful), I just don't see the overall point knowing that you're likely to have shit to do anyways (such as cleaning up from a flood). Otherwise I would just consider taking a vacation for a while to a place that does have power. If power is out there is no way my employer is getting me to go to work anyways.... if anything I would take a vacation and work from a hotel. But maybe I'm just being stupid since I haven't had to deal with long-term power loss.
I guess I don't see how great generators are.... Because no matter what a generator will never be enough. If it's summer here in Texas I would need my A/C minimum, and what else can you honestly use it for? Cooking is about all I can think of?
Unless the power is out for 2 months (doubtful), I just don't see the overall point knowing that you're likely to have shit to do anyways (such as cleaning up from a flood). Otherwise I would just consider taking a vacation for a while to a place that does have power. If power is out there is no way my employer is getting me to go to work anyways.... if anything I would take a vacation and work from a hotel. But maybe I'm just being stupid since I haven't had to deal with long-term power loss.
Jeebus - that has to cost a boatload - both for buying the generator ($10k+ ?) and the cost of using the gas?
Well 1st off is you can keep your fridge/freezer operating and avoid losing all of your food. Then you can run AC as long as it's a window unit, running a 4-ton central AC would be difficult if not impossible with a portable generator but that's OK, if you have just one small room with AC you can get by with that. You can also keep your phones/tablets charged up and if internet is still up keep up with changing local conditions. TX+FL have one thing in common, VERY hot/humid summer's, after spending the day outside doing the inevitable clean-up it's so much better to have a room with AC so you can get some much needed rest. As mentioned by Darwin, it all comes down to having enough gasoline to keep it going, one can be frugal and shut it down for several hours/day, a fridge/freezer will do just fine as long as it's powered back up withing 8-10 hours and let run for awhile to get the temps back down again.
Jeebus - that has to cost a boatload - both for buying the generator ($10k+ ?) and the cost of using the gas?
My parents have one too, yes the initial cost is pretty high for the genny but natural gas is pretty darn cheap so running it is probably cheaper than running a decent sized gas genny.
Yea, I've seen those on Ebay, IIRC they go for around $150 or so. Not very expensive considering the removal of the hassle of obtaining/storing/refueling gasoline. My problem is that while I have natural gas running up our street, I would have to pay to have a line brought up to the house and that's really expensive. No way the gas Co is gonna eat that cost for a commodity I might not even use for years. You can also convert them to run off propane tanks or even have a "dual-mode" setup that will run on either propane or gasoline. Thing is, empty propane tanks are about $25-30 for a 20lb'er..It's also possible to get a conversion kit to use natural gas on a portable generator. We've got a coworker who setup the natural gas hookup and transfer switch to the house. When the power goes out he just drags the generator over and hooks it up.
It's about 1/5 the cost of a slab mounted generator.
Don't most mortgages require flood insurance if you live in a flood zone?I said this on another forum that things like this are the reason for things like the mortgage crisis. You have huge city of millions of people with the likes of a $200k home that make bare minimum payments... so they have a $195k mortgage - their house floods, they didn't have flood insurance (because they are fucking retarded) and now they have $0 property value and a $195k mortgage loan. Let's be honest, none of them will be paying.
Well 1st off is you can keep your fridge/freezer operating and avoid losing all of your food. Then you can run AC as long as it's a window unit, running a 4-ton central AC would be difficult if not impossible with a portable generator but that's OK, if you have just one small room with AC you can get by with that. You can also keep your phones/tablets charged up and if internet is still up keep up with changing local conditions. TX+FL have one thing in common, VERY hot/humid summer's, after spending the day outside doing the inevitable clean-up it's so much better to have a room with AC so you can get some much needed rest. As mentioned by Darwin, it all comes down to having enough gasoline to keep it going, one can be frugal and shut it down for several hours/day, a fridge/freezer will do just fine as long as it's powered back up withing 8-10 hours and let run for awhile to get the temps back down again.
Exactly. During most of the hurricane season temps are in the 90s here and the humidity is 90+% so you basically have to chew your air before you breathe it. It's just miserable sleeping inside a house that has been baking in those conditions with no AC at all. Keeping your fridge/freezer going is pretty huge too. Most people have no clue how much $$ they have in their fridge until they have to throw everything out and replace it, depending on what is in your freezer it could actually be more than the cost of the genny and the fuel to keep it running. I'm in the roofing industry so after a hurricane hits is our "go time" so I'm working like crazy the day after it hits. We actually have tier 1 passes so we come back in town with the electric trucks and get through all of the checkpoints so that we can get critical buildings (police stations, hospitals, etc) dried in so that they can mitigate loss and hopefully continue to function.
I once had to take my genny from home and put it on an emergency repair for a day because the one the crew was using went down. I slept in my truck with the engine running and AC blasting that night, I had been out in the hot ass weather all day long and to hell with trying to sleep in it too. Luckily gas wasn't an issue with me.
I've looked into it for fun, you can get a smaller model Generac for like 5k. Runs on either propane or natural gas. With the price of hydro here it's even crossed my mind to run off generator only as it would actually end up cheaper especially if I add batteries and solar to the mix so generator would just run in a cycle charge configuration and not run all the time. In summer it would never need to run because the days are long. Though that's only a few months. Doubt it would be allowed though due to noise. The generator would probably need to kick on around midnight to top up the batteries, especially at peak of winter when I'd only get a few solar hours per day.
For whole house renewable/backup energy stuff it's the inverter that will cost a lot though. If I wanted to put the whole house on a solar/battery setup the inverter alone is like 10k, and I'd want two of them for redundancy.
In the case of a hurricane all of this is moot, because it will be under water and not work. Suppose you could get a snorkel kit for a generator?
thanks to some bastard in P&N, I've been reading articles all afternoon.
I knew the Red Cross was a lousy organization, but every time I read about their failures I get more angry.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-red-cross-secret-disaster
After Sandy hit, they were pissing away money like crazy and helping very few people. That doesnt bother me so much as their executives lying about how wonderful their organization is, and politicians kissing their butts. The Red Cross is so bad you'd be better off mailing supplies to disaster locales. The fuckin Postal Service will be there before the Red Cross trucks arrive.
My folks genny is actually really quiet, you can barely hear it inside and they have a pretty damn big house with TWO central AC units. And this is for power outage due to the storm, not flooding. Once your house floods the electric shit generally gets FUBAR'd regardless if you have power or not. I guess if you have a two story you could put that on another branch and have the genny just run the top story but you still have the issue of installing the genny and all of the wiring that high too.