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| ▲ | martinald 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's very location dependent fwiw. In the UK, I think I can remember 3 power outages my entire life. One when there was significant flooding in my hometown as a child, which lasted around a day, once at university for a few hours (local substation failed) and recently 30 minutes overnight while they were upgrading something (with a lot of notice). I may be undercounting/misremembering but I don't think its far off. I think the main difference is the UK in all but mostly rural areas has all the power lines underground. This is very different in eg North America where you can go a few blocks out of downtown areas and it is all overhead delivery. |
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| ▲ | ben_w 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages. Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them. I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though. |
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| ▲ | abakker 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours. |
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| ▲ | matthewfcarlson 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably | | |
| ▲ | jaggederest 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row. Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food. This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages. |
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| ▲ | strken 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The grid where I live has a target of 89 minutes of unplanned power outages per year for urban customers and somewhere in the high 200s for long rural feeder lines. This is in Australia, where serving outlying customers comes with some geographical challenges. I think it's currently sitting at 99.998% reliability. I can't remember the last unplanned outage longer than a couple of minutes, although they did some planned work last year and took out our power for half an hour. I'm surprised that someone would think days of power outages are normal everywhere. My family used to get hit with 8+ hour outages every few years back in the 90s because we were at the end of a single long rural feeder line, and we thought that was an unacceptable frequency. |
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| ▲ | ruszki 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don’t know where you live, but I experienced outage in Budapest once in at least 10 years while I lived there. And only one phase was out, not all. We even lamented with my friends that we didn’t even remember when was the last time when something like that happened. I never had to reconfigure the clock on my microwave, just for daylight saving time. I know that even 30 kms from there my granddad still experiences outages monthly, but there are places where that happens very-very rarely nowadays. |
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| ▲ | zanellato19 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I lost power for 10h in my city recently and it was a big fucking deal. The last 5 years that's the first time that happened. I would say I have less than a hour of downtime per year in the other years PS I don't live in the US. |
