One-Year Storm-i-versary

Last year, a big storm blew through that took our power out for over 24 hours. Funny enough, at the time, I waited to write a post about it because of a lingering issue post-storm that, it turns out, is still lingering. A year is long enough--let's get on with the post!

Having the electricity go out is not, in itself, much of an update. We've been pretty lucky due to the fact that our electrical circuit leads into the commercial part of town, so the few times we lose power, it usually comes back fast and is not worthy of a post. This time, however, we lost it for a while and we were READY! A few months before, we had purchased an electric vehicle (EV), as you may remember from this post about installing the EV charging station. At the time, D--in what turned out to be amazing foresight--also bought an adapter to allow our car to utilize its bidirectional charging capabilities. Meaning that power can also flow FROM the car to other things at 120V. This, it turned out, was fabulous timing.

A few hours into our black-out, we started to worry about how long our fridge would keep our food cold. Four hours, it turns out. A freezer will keep food safe for 24 to 48 hours, but a fridge (even without opening it and having it be pretty full) won't last long. That was, obviously, not great. But bring power in from the vehicle parked in the driveway and we were in the clear. The hardest part was pulling the fridge/freezer out from the wall. After that, we sent the charging cable from the driveway through the garage into the sunroom and then into the kitchen. 

Using a power strip, we also powered a small lamp and could charge our laptops and phones. It really felt like magic.

After charging up the fridge/freezer overnight and with no end to the blackout predicted, D rerouted the cables to go out the dining room window and drop down to the basement and through the door to give our basement chest freezer a burst of energy too. 

We were lucky that we got out of last storm season relatively unscathed but the heavy winds (or perhaps a flying branch) did manage to knock down one of our three chimney caps. We had them installed after a run-in with a raccoon more than 10 years ago, to make sure that no one else could decide to move in. The one that came down was the one mismatched one of the set of three, and we are pretty sure that it's the one that leads to the furnace, based on our drawings and understanding from that time period (I always swear I'm my own best reader!).

You can see from this picture (as storm clouds continued to roll through) that it's the back-most cap):

The problem is that our chimney sweep, who came to clean our chimneys last fall, said he couldn't get up there to replace it. He did say it was a good-quality cap and suggested it would be possible to paint it (presumably with something heat proof?) rather than replace it with a darker color to match.

All the chimney people look at our slate roof as a huge liability that they simply do not want to deal with and risk breaking. It doesn't help that the cherry tree in front of our house, exactly where they would want to put the ladder, has grown as well. Two companies later, we still haven't found anyone who wants to replace the chimney cap. We're not trying particularly hard, but any time we see someone working around town, we get them to come by and give a quote (a quote that remains: "no thanks, we can't do that job"). So here we are, approximately one year later with no resolution. Fortunately no critters have tried to move in yet.