I came awake about 0330 hrs yesterday morning. Something wasn’t right. The house was too quiet. I looked over at the clock and the clock was dark, not showing the time. Laid there in a vain attempt to see if the ceiling fan was still turning. Too dark to tell. House felt cold, or at least a lot colder than normal. Hauled out from beneath the warm covers and checked things out. No power! We were getting some freezing rain at the time with temps in the upper 20’s and it was a bit breezy. EMP? Well, my iPhone was working so, no…. thankfully. Used it to notify the power company about 0400hrs that we had an outage. Found out later the outage was contained just to my road, with almost 200 without power. So… light off the wood stove? Roll out and connect the generator? We had visiting family in the house and I knew they would require running water once they got up. (we are on a well) I decided to go back to bed and wait until it got light outside.
The power company texted that a tree was down across a line and that they estimated power to return around 1000hrs. No problem during warm weather, but it was a steady cold rain and the temp was dropping inside the house. I rolled the generator out and started a fire in the wood stove. Even for those few hours it was nice to have hot coffee, a hot shower, and warmth.
Power outages like this seems to be more common for us than previously. Thankfully this was just a few hours rather than days or even weeks. I’m with Whirlybird in that weather is our most immediate risk.