Storm
July 8th, 2014Update 7: Pictures
Solar Power Inverter: Grid Failure
Neighbors packed cars into our place to avoid flooding
Flood going down
Neighbor goes for it
Flood or no flood, our goat is still a dodgy beast
Up the road a bit more
The council came through and ran some chainsaws for a while
Tail end of flood, imagine the whole road as a raging river
We didn’t hold our breathes waiting for this to get sorted out
Reed made a wicked face over the mud situation, but he sill liked playing in it
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Update 6: Sunday night NZ time and the electricity is finally back on. Well, that was definitely the longest power outage I’ve ever gone through.
You know how I say that our area is in the Do-Last-If-At-All category—Well, maybe not. There are still a few places without power up here, but we were in a pretty exclusive club. At the peak, it was 16000 households (half of the total served by Top Energy) without power. The last update I saw this afternoon had the total number of houses without power at 450 and ours was still out. So, not-quite-last.
I’m going to post some regular Cryptogon stories now, but I’ll post a final update here with a few pics when I get some time.
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Update 5: Top Energy is finally on the scene out here (Sunday morning NZ time). Becky went to talk to them. Power might be back on by tonight. My guess is tomorrow at the earliest. Do last if at all… Everyone else we know has their juice back on already.
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Update 4: It finally stopped raining this morning. Power still out. Tree still over power lines up our valley. No sign of power company vehicles or aircraft.
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Update 3: Power is still out. There is a large tree over a powerline further up our valley. As you know, our valley is in the do last if at all category. So… Estimates are still Sunday/Monday NZ time, but don’t count on it.
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Update 2: It’s a grid down situation up here. Estimates for restoration of electricity range from Friday to Monday NZ time. Propane and Fenix flashlights are good things. T + C thankfully didn’t get water in their house.
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Update 1: Power has been out for about seven hours now and anyone trying to use our road at this point would need a boat and possibly a chainsaw. Trees are down all over the place. We have our neighbors’ goat and vehicles up here because their property is definitely going under tonight. Their house is on poles, but still: Pray/hope/meditate/wish for T and C to not get the river through their floorboards tonight!
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A severe storm has taken down the power here and the worst of it won’t hit until later tonight. If updates are slow, that’s why.
(Posting from my mobile phone.)
Via: New Zealand Herald:
A wild storm which has already cut power to more than 26,000 properties in Auckland and Northland is expected to peak between 2am and 6am.
The storm has already brought winds of up to 160km/h to parts of the Far North and is expected to hit Whangarei from about 10pm.
MetService forecasters issued a severe weather warning for Northland, predicting the region’s eastern hills could receive 120-160mm of rain over the 24 hours from about midday. Severe easterly gales, with gusts of 140km/h in exposed places were also expected.
The winds had already ripped roofs from their houses and felled numerous trees throughout the region.
In Auckland, easterly gales were expected to strengthen with severe gales rising to 120 km/h are in exposed places.
Best wishes for a speedy return to normality! In the meantime I suppose it must feel like something of a grid-down training exercise.
I second that. Hoping there’s not too much of a clean up around your house.
Is there any way to get some juice out of your grid-tied pv system when the grid is down? Or would that require some redundancy and extra investment? (And/or negate some of your local incentives?)
@jakdmsy
In its present configuration, no, the system stops producing any power during grid failure. This happens to make sure that linemen can’t be injured or killed by the electricity that it could potentially export to the grid.
Now, the U.S. version of my inverter has a dedicated 1.5kw AC plug on it. So, on a 5KW inverter, it will let you take a maximum of 1.5KW out of it during grid failure. For whatever reason, that’s allowed in the U.S. It’s definitely not allowed here in NZ. I asked about this before I bought it.
When this outage first happened, I thought that the thing to do would be to get some cheap lucky dragon off grid inverter and simply plug my strings into that. But the fact was that the sun didn’t come out for days.
There are some really cheap 12v inverters on ebay, 3000 watt, that connect directly to the terminals on car batteries. That’s enough to run the fridge for a couple of hours per day to keep things ticking over. I also can’t believe how cheap some of those lucky dragon generators are as well. Of course, you get what you pay for. Everything I’ve read says that Honda generators are very good and very expensive.