Should I Sell My Gear?

6FPS V7#3: March 10, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

February was an interesting month. When we moved in, the neighbors told us we wouldn’t see much snow, that mostly they got a flurry every year or two. In reality, we’ve had, typically, one significant snow every year we’ve been here. This year it hit right at the start of February, and we got an inch or so, and then a few days later a full 6”. Because it was pretty cold, that took over ten days to fully melt off, although our driveway was usable the whole time since we never really had a thaw/freeze. Still, a few deliveries were delayed or cancelled, some drivers parked at the top and walked things in (bless you!) and Fedex bagged it and left it at the top of the hill, which I’m quite okay with.

And a week after we finally melted out, another storm blew in, and this one was a doozy. We saw wind gusts here at 28MPH and sustained winds above 15. The night it hit, about 1AM as I was getting read to go to bed, I could see the light flickering started, and sure enough, about five minutes later, we went dark.

Fortunately, we have the new emergency generator up and running — we literally had the final permit sign off the week before the storm — and it kicked in and lit up parts of the house. We ended up without power for 15 minutes short of two full days, and the generator was a champ. It kept the refrigerators and freezer cold, gave us power for the microwave and some of the kitchen outlets, so we could make some food, and kept the well and water heater running. No stove, no oven, but if we hadn’t have replaced it, we would have had to toss everything in the freezer because of this.

And, yeah, when it became clear it needed replacing I wondered if we really needed it, since before this event our longest outages were in the 2-3 hour range, but it (literally) saved our bacon, and while $15K isn’t a small chunk of change, it would have been really uncomfortable without it (and expensive in lost food). So, glad it’s here. It looks like it uses about 10% of the propane tank in 24 hours, and yes, I’ve had the tank re-filled already — but we seem to have enough for about a week long outage if we ever need it.

One thing that came in really handy: I’d bought a Jackery 1000Kw power station, in case we needed power during the outage, and while we have our CPAPs on UPS boxes, those are only good for about 2 hours, which led to a rather uncomfortable first night for me. wiring those up to the Jackery gave us a full night sleep the second night and we woke to about 30% power left. It recharged off the generator power in about an hour and was ready to go again.

So all in all, this storm event for us wasn’t significantly painful. The folks who designed this house thought out the emergency power really well overall. If we hadn’t replaced the generator, it would have been really uncomfortable.

Since the storm, I’ve bought a second 1000Kw station, this one from Anker since it was half the price), and a couple of D-battery powered camp lanterns, and some spare D-cells for them. There were a few times where a lantern would have been more convenient than flashlights, and having a second power source gives us emergency options if we should need them. Laurie bought an electric griddle for when the stove isn’t functional, just in case. Other than that, we didn’t see much need to add to emergency supplies

That storm blew in major damage all across the region: At one point Puget Sound Electric was reporting around 1,000 seperate outages impacting over 100,000 customers — with pretty much all of Bainbridge Island and the city of Port Orchard dark, along with big chunks of Bremerton. There was damage to a few substations and some distribution lines that took a while to repair, and some parts of Port Orchard seemed to stay dark into a third day.

All is back to normal around here though, but that was one heck of a doozy.