Hurricane Dorian started making itself felt yesterday and slowly came closer overnight. The weather radio blared out a flash flood warning at 0430 that woke me up this morning so that I wouldn’t miss too much of Dorian’s approach.
Through the rest of the day, Dorian crawled by, skimming the SC coast and bringing some steady but not torrential rains, and a lot of wind at the house. The 24 hours or so of sustained winds with Dorian seemed to cause more problems than water this time, although there was still plenty of flooding going on. Twitter was full of reports of downed trees and branches, and power outages.
The generator transfer switch we had installed last year got it’s first non-testing use today. Power went out at the house around noon, unlike a lot of other areas where power went out early in the morning.
Around 4PM, I decided the refrigerator and freezer had been without power long enough so I got the generator set up out in the driveway, connected it to the transfer switch, and fired up the generator. Switched over the refrigerator, freezer, smoke detectors, and kitchen island (so I could run my laptop) to the generator and flipped each of them on. Everything came on like it should have. So much easier than running extension cords everywhere like we did for Florence.
The big black switches down the middle of the transfer switch switches each circuit between mains power and the generator. The white switches along the sides are off/on switches for each circuit. Fire up the generator, switch the desired circuit from line to generator, and flip the switch to on. Circuit is on generator power now. Easy peasy. I also decided each switch needed labels to make it easier to tell what circuits we wanted to switch over to the generator.
The power came on about an hour later, so I didn’t have to be on generator power for too long fortunately (generator is loud!). Good test of getting the generator deployed and testing the transfer switch. I left the generator and power cord out for a little while longer in case power dropped out again, but it stayed on so everything got put back away for next time.
The only problem I ran into was that we had let a bunch of stuff pile up in front of the transfer switch, so I had to move a few things out of the way. A pretty minor problem, but something to avoid doing for the future.
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