Hurricane Irma

Yeah, with highs expected to be in the mid/upper 80’s it won’t take long :frowning:

ouse survived as did my weather station. Just a little damage on my house but others in the neighborhood didn’t far as well. I have no power so can’t extract data from the logger. Should be interesting to see what it holds since the eye passed maybe 30 miles away at most. Will post info once I’m able to get the data. Do

Is it a VP2 logger at one minute intervals so approx 42 hours of storage? Has the console been running on batteries since so continuing to store data?

good to hear your house and weather station are OK
was there much flooding in your area?

Using a Belfre logger. I was able to extract data but some bad news. It appears there was some water egress and the ISS stopped reporting. It started again about 20 hours later but now the anemometer and wind direction is no longer reporting correctly. Only getting 1-5mph readings since it came back online. What I did see is that was a we had a 70mph gust before it stopped reporting.

I just back power today around noon. Many parts of the county still without power. Yes, we had some flooding in a few areas. 4 foot still standing is some areas. http://www.nbc-2.com/clip/13706402/buckingham-under-water-after-hurricane-irma

I’m often tempted to re-build my ISS electronics unit in a NEMA waterproof box. I just don’t trust that seal design to stand up to a real storm - fortunately we never get those :wink:

I have a correction. Just looked at WU and I see the figures are a bit different than what I seen in my WD logs, but I might have missed that since I was pretty whipped from all the travel when I looked at them. WU shows an 84 MPH wind gust at 6:14 when the anemometer stopped reporting and and 28.11 barometer at 7:00pm. Rain was 5.11" but I’m sure sure that isn’t correct. With the wind speed and the shaking of the pole mount in those winds it could be just about anything. Didn’t start saving data again until 8am the next morning.

I’ll have to take a closer look at the log files when I get a chance.

We got power back this morning, after 3.5 days. We do have a Generator and were able to keep fridge and freezer running most of the time and only had minimal spoilage.

No damage to anyone right around us but just a block or two away in both directions trees into houses and cars occurred :confused:

Those close to rivers and streams are still suffering from Flooding as well as trees down…

But everyone we know came through basically fine with little to no real damage and no injuries so that is what is important :slight_smile:

-Bob

@hankster
that is a decent gust!
@JaxWeather
great you are OK and you had a back up generator

I would have thought more in Florida would be offgrid?
also I am surprised not more power is underground (which is not full proof either though but must be better) and or not more maintenance is done on trees near power lines etc?

At peak more that 6 million were without power. A lot is underground but the damage covered basically the whole state (400 miles x 150 miles) and I would guess a lot could have been a cascading effect.

Based on the numbers I can find Florida actually has a surprisingly low number of home solar installs compared to the population. I’m not sure of the reason for that but maybe utility power is cheap. In general there are very few off-grid solar installs here except in very rural areas where no grid power is available. The common grid connected solar systems (like mine) are designed to only generate power when the grid is up.

Yeah, about the only solar you see around here is for the pools :slight_smile:

This got me to thinking and I found this great discussion on this on Reddit Reddit - Dive into anything

Just to add, much of Florida is sand and is difficult to dig without collapsing. This allows it to drain well but it is unstable. Second is how low the land is. I am about 10 miles from the Gulf and I am only 9 ft. above sea level. There is a lot of moisture in the soil and much of the area is prone to localized flooding even in heavy rainstorms.

Much of the city (and many other cities in Florida) are criss crosesed with canals which makes underground much more difficult and expensive to install. See attached map of just one part of the city.


yeah, those problems certainly make it harder
what about tree maintenance near the power lines?

That’s a reliability issue, and here in the west it’s a fire issue too. PG&E, the near monopoly electric utility in N California, has paid big penalties over the years for fires caused by trees contacting power lines. They’ve been spending more money and doing a better prevention job recently. In my local area a contracted vegetation management company is continually monitoring the lines down to street level. They have all the trees and their species mapped, and the software predicts growth.

That is a problem but I guess the ease of repair makes up for the problems underground have. As of this morning, our county of 260K residents, 29% are still without power.

On the question of off-grid I did some research. Local electric in my area is 10.4 cents per kwH (converts to 15 cents NZD). Looks like that is about half of NZ prices.

The tariffs are very complicated but my average cost for 2016 was $0.24/kWh (PG&E) northern California.

Just looked at my last bill. Total after fees was $0.118/kWh (LCEC Lee County Electric Co-op).

Energy Charge − first 500 kWh at $0.076)
Energy Charge − next 500 kWh at $0.0864)
Power Cost Adj. ($0.0063/kWh)

googling for NZ, this is probably the best power price
https://www.flickelectric.co.nz/pricing?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI18G-yaGr1gIVCQoqCh3oDwwTEAAYASAAEgJgOPD_BwE
(we are off grid here so I dont get a power bill :slight_smile: )

Wow, that is cheap 8O