Power outage

Overnight Thursday night, we were awakened by our power failure monitor blinking, indicating that we'd lost shore power.

Power failure monitor

It might seem odd, but it is difficult for us to know when we've lost shore power -- supply immediately transfers over to provide our needs from the batteries for everything that receives power through the inverter. The only things that don't work are items that are not wired through the inverter -- rooftop air conditioners, installed stove top, electric elements of the water heater, washing machine, and clothes dryer. It is not terribly uncommon that, if we are plugged in to 30A power, we lose shore power by using more than 30A and tripping the breaker. We try to be conservative but sometimes an additional load comes onto the system that we aren't aware of and we'll trip the breaker. If the microwave happens to be running when we lose shore power, we can detect a slight difference in its sound. If a rooftop air conditioner (heat pump) is on, it will go off, but, of course, it also goes off when the temperature gets to the desired setting, so that does not necessarily clue us in. While having things automatically run off the batteries is nice for continuance, it means that we are using the batteries unknowingly, and it might be that we could fix the problem easily (turn some appliances off and reset the breaker).

So, we got the power failure monitor (actually, power failure alarm, but the alarm part was VERY loud and VERY annoying so we cut the wires to it). It had to be plugged into an outlet that would *not* receive power from the inverter when we lost shore power, so we plugged it in at the same outlet as the clothes dryer, and we have it hanging outside the door for our laundry machines. With the alarm part disabled, it just blinks a red light, notifying us that we're running off of battery power - which hopefully we'll notice, even if we don't notice other clues.

One evening when we were at Water's Edge Campground down near Gros Morne, the area lost power and we were aware of it due to our monitor. Looking out, we could see that none of the houses in the area had lights on, and our campground neighbors were also working on providing alternate power for themselves (there was a group of 3 RVs that had come in, and only one had a generator, so the other two ran power cords over to their friend's unit). I found a way to look up information about power outages (there are at least two power companies that service different parts of the island of Newfoundland) -- I could see that the outage was unplanned and they weren't sure of the cause. That evening, power came back on before 11pm.

This time, the blinking light woke me up about 2:25am. Carl got up and checked to see if he saw any lights outside; he did not. I tried checking the power outage site, but we have been using the campground's internet, and it had lost power too. There wasn't any cellular service either - I don't know whether cell towers lost power, or whether the cellular service is really bad here (thus the need for the "relic" in the laundry room that was pictured in yesterday's post).

In the morning, since we had been using the electric element of our Oasis heating system to provide our heat -- and that requires shore power -- it was 53F inside. Carl switched the heating system over to the diesel burner and we quickly had warmth inside.

Carl went out to check to make sure it wasn't just our problem. He talked with a couple of our fellow campers, and particularly those with trailers were dealing with extremely low battery power -- if you usually stay in campgrounds with power supplied, you may not care about having very robust batteries and may not have a generator. It seems that the campground water might also be out (probably their water pump not running) - so people who depend on getting "shore water" (more commonly called "city water") were also having difficulties with their water supply.

Carl put our Dishy out, and we were able to get online. I looked up information from the power company:

We are in St Lunaire-Griquet.

Unplanned outage, under investigation, no ETA, 1156 customers affected

I am guessing that the 20 or so RVs in this campground count as only "1" customer -- the campground itself that has the account with the power company.

We are blessed -- we can run our heat on diesel, we can start the generator to provide power if we don't want to run off the batteries, we have plenty of water in our fresh water tank and the water pump to supply it for our needs. 

But... we are getting a wee bit tired of rain and cold!

Note: power came back on by about 10:45am -- soon after I had typed this in on Friday morning!