They did some rolling blackouts here, because most of our power comes from natural gas and that was in short supply somehow. I borrowed my Dad's extra generator and got it setup to run the needed items just in case. I didn't need thankfully.

After reading this, I am seriously considering a built in automatic backup generator. With a very large fuel storage tank, enough for a few weeks at least. Diesel or propane.

Our neighbors down the street have one, runs on propane but everything in that house runs on electricity. The power goes out frequently around here and could be as long as two weeks sometimes. We are at the end of a line with only three houses here so not a big priority. I have two 3500 running watt gasoline generators that I can swap out to keep the power going but buying gasoline for them can be expensive and difficult at times. I have looked into the backup generators and may get one but we don't use a lot of electricity most of the appliances in this house are natural gas except the washer, freezer and refrigerators. our heat is also NG. You can get those backup generators to run on NG as well and since there is a NG well on our property I'm not too worried about not being able to get that. Occasionally it does freeze but I've been able to get it flowing again.
Luckily we have not lost power here but it has happened south and west of us. We didn't get the ice storms here, just snow. I have over 50 gallons of gas in storage that should last two or more weeks. Good luck to you guys without power or heat. Why hasn't the administration declared a disaster and sent FEMA and the NG out to help you guys?

[quote=bigdad]Yeeesh ..

So ,a winter storm hits .. like they often do this time of year .. They are shutting off our power to provide electricity to the states below us .. , they can actually go into the pwr grid and not allow you to use water heaters , stoves, W/D ..etc ..

I've lost pwr at house yesterday from 2 pm to 4 pm .. didn't affect me much , Texas is rough shape ..kinda funny they were always barking at me when I lived there about being on their own pwr grid and stuff so they could leave the union and survive on their own , looks like they can't .

Your welcome SD to the rescue ! [/quote

The problem is the energy here is supplied by windmills now. Texas is up to 25% wind power now. When they shut down, there is not enough gas fired plants to take up the slack like there used to be. The politicians in Washington decide what Texas does , not Texas. All these green people need to wake up. They won’t.

Texas has its own power grid ..ERCOT messed it up ,


Bill Gates says its not wind towers fault ..


https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/...age-claims-climate-change-002303596.html

my younger brother in Houston needed a generator and bought a Ryobi at Home Depot.
In helping find out what manufacturers engine it had (Honda GX390) I came upon this online seller

https://www.generatoronlinestore.com/ryobi-generator.html

and was surprised to find that Ryobi also factory makes 6300 watt ($433) and 700 watt ($151) propane fueled units

The little cheap 700 watt propane unit left me wanting to pull out the Kill-A-Watt meter
and measure what the total of the circulating fan and downdraft fan is, plus the temporary period when the ignitor power draw is on.

I spent 20+ years working in an industry where the power going out just wasn't an option so my perspectives are a bit skewed. Standard setup was 1 or more huge Cat 16 cyl diesel generators with big battery banks to feed the inverters after utility cuts off while waiting for the gen to spin up. Includes big enough underground tank to run the thing for a few days at minimum and the biggest issue was treating the fuel to survive sitting in the tank until needed.

A scaled down set up was high on my list when I bought my first house and 20+ years later, still on the list. Shopped the Generac whole house units and discovered NG only and don't have that this far out in the sticks. Revisited later and saw versions that can run on pump gas but the MPG was horrible. Haven't looked in to availability of propane fed units but I'm thinking swapping out NG for propane should be fairly simple. I think a standard issue fork lift tank (33 lbs cap) should probably keep it up for at least 8 hours.

Have had enough 12 hour outages that it would be "nice to have" but local grid maintenance has improved up time and shortened black outs. The only time it would have been "worth the investment" is when Sandy rolled through and the place went dark for 3 days. Rode that out living in front of the wood fire place, not flushing toilets and fortunately had a stash of cold cuts. I think if I was in TX this week I'd drain the pipes and bug out for a hotel in OK.

Some interesting options here but haven't looked at final sale prices:

https://www.govplanet.com/Generator+Sets

Just remember for them to work when needed generators must be tested and maintained. Diesel needs to be tested and treated. Then with propane you could have delivery problems and a tank to hold that much would be large and expensive.

Natural gas has often been thought of as a 100% available fuel but that has not been the case this time around.

After running data centers for many years I had to learn about this stuff.

You n me must be identical twins! I could have wrote that word for word. Did exactly the same setup.

But every time I lose power, drag it out and hook it up, the power comes right back on...

Oh well, at least it’s there if the real need hits...

I have friends who have backup whole house generators and they are set up to turn on and run once a week to confirm they are still online, and to keep them from having maintenance problems,. With my Yamaha portable generator, I've been told I should start it and run it once a month, preferably with something plugged into it to put a load on it. I try to do that, but have to admit sometimes a couple months will go by before I think to do it.

The problem is Texas has know for over a decade that they needed to upgrade their gas and electric generation for colder weather and reserve capacity. They haven't keep up with added generation for their growth and are living on the edge.The big boys want to stay independent and have a monopoly on residents of Texas but they don't want to pay for the upgrades. The only reason Texas has wind power is it was basically free from the feds and added capacity. Funny that Iowa has the second most windmills of any state and they work. Natural gas works in even of the coldest parts of the US. They've been pocketing the funds that should have been used to upgrade their systems for years. It's plan mismanagement and watch how quickly they reach into our pockets and ask the feds to upgrade their independent grid.

Iowa did not get the ice Texas did so maybe that's it. I still do not understand the natural gas freeze up, our gas meters and pipe are outside, it gets to -30, 202 hours straight below zero, and it has never been an issue. We have run black iron gas line right on the ground to get heat in a garage till spring and it never freezes. Maybe it is like an airhose, when it goes thru an orifice it freezes? It kinda looks like some power plant onsite liquid natural gas storage and insulation might be the thing to do, before we go all government program and make it worse. I would like to hear from some engineers, maybe those in a cold weather state, that knows natural gas, and keep the politicians away to solve it.

EROCT screwed up all right. They’ll just pass the blame. They could make provisions for the ice on the turbines, but they chose not to so they could save money. According to one guy, “ this will happen once every ten years unless you want to spend big bucks to prepare. So, it’s not worth it. “ As far as Bill Gates, that guy is only interested in his agenda and that’s it. He’s worse than a politician. I’ve seen it this cold ten years ago and we did not have water or electric problems. Everyone is moving to Texas for sure and it will continue to stress our infrastructure. Hm. Seams like there was this elected official that mentioned we need to fix our infrastructure in the USA instead of supporting all these foreign countries. I wonder who that was? .

Had one customer location with the big diesel back up generator set up. Would work mostly fine during routine run tests. When the transfer switch tried to spin it up automatically, it would usually fail. Took way too long for the vendor to find that bug but at least we had juice. In this part of the world propane is very common in trailer parks, weekend homes and warehouses so keeping the tank full doesn't sound like weakest link in the plan. As far as I can tell from running fork lifts, ya get about the same mileage from the same size tank NG vs propane.

Diving down the rabbit hole for a bit: Looks like above ground tanks range from $500 ish for 120 gal cans to $1500 for the monster 500 gallon. Not horrible in the context of what the generator and xfer switch is gonna cost. Retail residential propane is about $2.50 / gal right now. Generac says an 11kw generator will burn 2 gal/hr at full load but ya really gotta dig. Lost interest before getting to the answer about gallons per KwH based on fuel type. Rough estimate to run my entire house (electric heat pump) on propane looks like $8-10k installed and $8-10 in fuel per hour. Bugging out for a hotel with power is way cheaper.

Here's someone with solar + batteries. Only one with lights on in his neighborhood.

https://twitter.com/dayyanl/status/1361488731195146243

Plus, the solar will generate money the other 51 weeks of the year. A standby generator won't

I've been told the freezing is from moisture in the lines. NG operates at about 5psi so not a lot of pressure. Where or how the moisture gets there I don't know. From the well or condensation inside the transmission equipment maybe?

I don't know for sure but I remember hearing complaints about 25 years ago they'd dropped the pressure from ~ 8 to 4psi, complaint being it was an effective rate increase. After the NG explosions in NW Dallas two years ago there's been some chatter about pressure being dropped AGAIN. Complaints about record NG bills seem to back up the assertion.

We bought our 500gal propane tank used a few years ago off Craig's List for $350. It was ugly, needed paint. Still see them on there regularly from $400 to $750 depending on condition. Smaller ones are quite a bit less money. Propane has been $1.30 +/-, but I haven't checked the last month or two.

I'm gonna keep my eye out for another cheap 500gal tank. That way we have plenty of capacity for whatever may come. $500 or so is cheap insurance even if we don't really need that much capacity.

I don't know, we don't pay for it, it's deeded to us as the well is on the property. It's up on top of the mountain where we don't see it anyway unless you walk up there. The neighbors tell me the freezing only happens when the sun comes out which increases my speculation that it's condensation related.

Well everything is controlled by SCADA, you lose power, backup generators turn on, they last about 3 days before they run out of fuel. Once the generators are dead, you lose communications to the system, once that is lost the systems assumes there is a catastrophic failure in the gas or electric grid, which then turns off both systems, which control the generators...its a triangle of systems for the grid and if you have a failure in any of the parts of the system long enough, you can lose the entire system. Then you have to manually turn things back on, which requires power and communication at each specific point to get the gas back on which runs a lot of power plants. Those said power plants then power the grid and communications networks. Not an easy or cheap fix if there is a serious national disaster. Tim