| ▲ | tehwebguy 3 days ago |
| Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity |
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| ▲ | hedora 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| From a Pineapple Express a few years back (80+ mph gusts and lots of landslides): - When putting in rural/exurb solar, make sure you have a secondary charge source for your house batteries. This can be a car or a propane generator, but check compatibility before buying anything. Solar won’t cut it (storms are cloudy), and propane won’t cut it (no roads, and also, there’s probably a shortage of supply and trucks). - Whatever cell networks people fall back on will effectively be down (as you saw with verizon) - all emergency services websites should fall back to web 1.0 forms and static images if they take more than 5-10 sec to load. Loading a pile of JS and CSS to load a fake modal that obscures the content affer 5 min of loading at 2G speeds doesn’t count (looking at you PG&E) |
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| ▲ | defrost 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > and propane won’t cut it Depends entirely on tank size really. Standard (in Australia) is 2x45kg household cylinders (chest high to an adult) for household cooking. (Finish one, switch to the other while waiting for swap). It's not hard to have eight or more cyclinders on standby and to keep them topped up for when needed. For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger. When disaster strikes a bulk tank lasts a long time if the primary drains on it (eg: a tile or glass furnace) are wound back or turned off. Eg: https://www.supagas.com.au/for-home/lpg-gas-bottles/tanks | | |
| ▲ | toast0 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger. Seems kind of small if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? I've got a 500 gallon propane tank for domestic use (stove, waterheater, fireplace) and another 500 gallon tank for my generator. The internet says a 500 gallon tank at 80% full (max safe fill) is about 750 kg of propane. We've had a few two day outages, but no three day outages since we moved here, but neighbors report some outages in the 7-10 day timeframe. 500 gallon tanks seem pretty popular around these parts, commercial/government goes bigger, small properties go smaller; plenty of neighbors have no generator and may not have propane either; government runs warming centers if you can get there. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Seems kind of small it's not uncommon to have .. 210kg LPG bulk cylinders .. and larger.
Nearly five standard 45kg household tanks is the smallest capacity fixed installation bulk tank supplied by one local gas company. The option to rent larger tanks on a long term contract exists.> if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? Many rural locations here have regular deliveries .. the milk gets picked up every day for example (multiple double tanker trucks worth from, say, the Cowaramup* district alone). There's no need for a larger tank simply because you're rural unless you explicitly want constant gas at a particular delivery rate sufficient to last out a supply issue of {X} {time units}. ( For example if you run a continuously fired glass furnace + annealers, have a ceramics business as a side hustle, specifically have emergancy services generators for blackouts etc. ) > government runs warming centers if you can get there. Your local government I assume - this isn't something ours has ever considered TBH. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowaramup,_Western_Australia#A... | | |
| ▲ | hedora 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 750kg (500 gal) is the smallest you can get around here. A house backup generator uses something like 3kg of propane per hour idle, so that tank will keep your fridge on for ~ 10 days. Our area (outskirts of Silicon Valley) saw 20-30 day power outages with essentially no sun that year. The weather is rapidly worsening due to climate change, but they are also hardening the infrastructure. Now, with a battery + backup generator + wood stove, you only need to run the generator to charge the house batteries. Assume a duty cycle of a few hours of optimal efficiency generator per day, wood heating, and you can easily exceed the 30 day target. At that point the sun should be out, at least here in California, or at least the roads will be open enough to let the propane supply chain adapt to the demand. For the EV route, buy a truck or SUV with vehicle to home support, and a house battery that can charge off the vehicle. The truck has 2-4x a house battery in it. This plan assumes there’s a fast charger in town (ideally near the grocery store), and it’s under ~ 100 miles round trip. Edit: I’ll add local pricing: A used >= 100 kwh ev is about $30K. The generator + permits + tank is > $20k. With the ev route, you also get a nice car. I didn’t price out generator + 2000 gallons of propane storage. It’d guess it’s about $30k. | | |
| ▲ | olyjohn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Maybe you don't need such a huge generator. Run your fridge and a small heater, and only heat a small section of your house. Were talking about emergencies here, not keeping your hot tub running. I can heat a bedroom easily with a 1500 watt space heater. And my fridge pulls an average of about 150 watts. Quite honestly, a whole house generator is for convenience when there's a tree that falls on a power line. It sounds like a real waste for an actual emergency. |
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| ▲ | jcoby 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up It really depended on where you were. In my area everything was down. Literally and figuratively. The only utility that worked was gas. T-Mobile was the first to come back up but it took weeks. I could occasionally get one bar of LTE if I climbed to the top of the hill but even then I could only send or receive about 1 SMS every few minutes. Once I was able to get out of the neighborhood I could drive 5 miles away and get cell service and spotty data on Verizon. NPR's updates were our most reliable way to get information on what was happening. > - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity Having supplies on hand and being patient worked out for us. We waited until 40 was clear and were able to head to the Triad for supplies and gas. In the mean time the neighborhood got together and cut up downed trees and filled in the missing road so it was easier to get in and out of the neighborhood. |
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| ▲ | Lammy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity Corollary: carry cash, so you can buy things without depending on Point Of Sale systems being on and able to talk to the payment card networks. My favorite nearby ATM dispenses $100 bills, so I can have several hundred tucked in my wallet without taking a lot of space. |
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| ▲ | rationalist 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I recommend having a mix of bills; the other person may not have change. Clarification: Sure, keeping a $100 bill tucked away in the wallet for emergencies is a great idea (and I do that too), but wherever you keep emergency supplies, I suggest having a mix of smaller bills. | | |
| ▲ | myself248 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Absolutely. The $100's are for getting a hotel room or something. The $20's are likely the largest other merchants will break. My emergency cash stash has a couple $100's and a ton of $5's because I'm not super limited on space, and when everyone else has $20's and needs them broken, a bunch of $5's makes everything easy, and beats carrying a whole bucket of $1's. Learned that at flea-markets. | |
| ▲ | j16sdiz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Agree. Let time I visit the USA, many shop don't have changes for $100 bills.
I found $20 bills the easiest to use. (I am not an American, was on a work trip) | |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | xfil 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not Helene for me, but another ISP frustration anecdote from living in a forested area (line damage from tree limbs is common enough) with imperfect cellular data connection: - the Comcast Xfinity app is extremely bloated and runs into error after error on a poor connection, yet the only time I ever use it is when I have connection problems. Most other apps I use run smoother under similar circumstances. Boggles the mind why one of the US's largest ISPs wouldn't make their primary customer support portal be lightweight and reliable on spotty cellular data. |
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| ▲ | rationalist 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have a dual-SIM phone with AT&T and T-Mobile lines (a Google Pixel). I wish they had a triple-SIM phone, then I could add Verizon. Now that I think about it, I think you can have multiple eSIMs, but only one can be active at a time. |
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| ▲ | antonymoose 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm This is such a big one for any event anytime. Better yet, never go below a half-tank on your vehicle. You’ll almost always have enough range to get out of dodge and also have a mobile cooling / heating / charging station if you’re stuck in place. I grew up on an island and what I thought was universal storm advice was clearly not. During Helene I had to drive 80+ miles from the Clemson, SC area through to Asheville to bail out my sister-in-law and her husband and their two month old stranded in Asheville. They had only two gallons of diesel in their F-250. The drive up I-26 looked like some kind of zombie flick with a line of 50-100 cars on every interstate off ramp leading up to defunct gas stations with crowds of people just meandering about. If you’re a mild prepper type, GMRS radios (or a jailed broke Baofeng…) are a great tool. I had no cellular service for the majority of my drive. I was able to stay in comms with my “convoy” the whole way. Perhaps as importantly, a spare, unused Jerry can is incredibly valuable. In my case I have gasoline cans but not diesel and so I had to pay a greedy boomer 3-4x market rate to buy one of his four 5 gallon cans in the Lowe’s checkout line to get a clean fuel canister. |
