im back

well im back this last week has been a nightmare for the whole family, lost power last saturday early am, we're rural, and that's not unusual, but after a time, i began to notice. the only ones without power is us! that's not good, power is live at the meter which thanks to the previous owner is 500 feet away, had the electrical guy come out and locate the line which is underground, he marked it, using dowsing rods? on aluminum wire? but... he got lost ,i know where the power goes into the house due to previous adventures, and his "location" isn't even on the same side of the house,about normal for 'professionals' around here, so we dug some test holes with the backhoe,looking for power lines, [ main breaker off!]found it, yep broke it, spliced it,tried the breaker, and had hot line there, but not at the house, after a day digging some more holes revealing nothing, no wires in the most likely locations, its time to call it and start over, so, 1 week, a grand, 1 messed up backhoe engine, which im hoping is just a injector or 2 taking a dump, [ the thing only has 2300 hours on it] and 500 foot of new wire, plus cutting my farm road which is/was paved, im back, now the bad part is with no power, lites are not really an issue , we retire early at nite as most farm folk do, and have plenty of battery powered lites, but no power means running the generator every 4 hours in order to save our food in 3 fridges/ freezers, that means nite time too get up at 12, start generator, get up at 100 turn off, get up at 5 start gen, turn off at 6, you get it, no deep restful sleep!, now the real fun, showers are at my mil's house which is 30 miles away, annoying, but toilet, ah yes that! well, you get a bucket, and go to the river, which you have to climb down a steep 40 foot bank, then come in and fill the toilet and take care of business, what a week!

Where are you located?
Sounds like you had quite a week!

im in southern new mexico, about 15 miles east of ruidoso, and 50 miles west of roswell

Why can't you take a shower when the generator is running.

Freezers can go 24 hours with hardy any rise in temperature unless you are opening the door every hour to check the temperature.

generator is a stand alone unit on my service truck, not hooked into the breaker box

Do you know that you can feed the power from the generator to any outlet to feed the house? It will only backfeed half of the breakers. You can put a jumper in the breaker box to the other half of the breakers. Be sure to shut off the main breaker.

RLP in Co- I'm cooking the popcorn, LOL

Are you in the heart of Billy the Kid Country?...Lincoln county wars.

Electrition we work with has a detector to find open wires. Located one for my shop no problem in a few minutes, knew exactly where to dig and splice. Sorry it's to late for you.

Sounds like you need to build an outhouse. Even with the power on if the weather is nice nothing beats doing your business with the door open and having a view. And when the power is off it one less hassle to worry about. I maintain one for those two reasons.

Sounds like you have elec. service that you can usually count on. Here in the North East most of us have our own generator that runs 24-7 until the indicator light shows that power from the utility is back on..

yes i am, about 20 miles from Lincoln nm, the coe ranch, and tunstall canyon is 1 mile from me

Decades ago when I lived in Romeoville, IL. once we had a major storm pass through that knocked the power out on a Sunday morning. I watched the folks get and lose their power three times before I got mine back the following Wednesday evening. I was on a different grid clearly. I of course called Edison whom told me that they have to deal with the larger outages first, smaller pockets back burner. I'm reasonable. I fully understand that. But now its Wednesday and I watched the area across the street that was no larger than my area get and lose its power three times since Sunday, and now I'm having one huge non-stop barbecue on my weber because EVERYTHING that was in the freezer had thawed, and better to cook it and invite folks over to at least eat some of it as opposed to toosing it all into the garage.

But then again, if life was perfect, I'd be awfully bored. I hate being bored.

Mark