I am thinking for the past couple of days I should thank the Good Lord for Global Warming! We just had the 2d coldest night in North Texas history without heat. We were without power for about 8-9 hours on Monday morning and 8:00 Monday evening it went out until this afternoon. It got down to -3F here which is pretty much unheard of plus we have about 5 inches of snow on the ground with another 2-3 inches possible this evening.
After the utility missing their restoration time I decided to hook up the generator which was tucked away in a back corner of the garage covered with crap, well, the wife dug it out.
While I was pulling it outside, hooking up the cable, and throwing the bypass switches in the breaker panel she went to get gas. I filled the tank (HF Predator 8.75KW) and turned on the gas valve and apparently the float is stuck (I hope) as gas poured out from behind the carb. I shut off the gas and got it started and was able to find a "sweet spot" on the gas valve where it would run without barfing gas all over but decided that was not really a solution so I drug a partially filled propane tank out and fired it up on that. Of course, after going through all of that and running on the generator for not quite an hour grid power came back up! Wife loaded up a couple of empty propane tanks and lo and behold everybody was out of propane and the places where you can just swap in your tank for a new filled one were also out! I hope we make it through the night without the juice going out again.
OK, I'm done whining. All donation of cheese will be accepted - I ain't proud!
The good part is the generator covered all of our needs without complaint and I am thinking about getting a really big propane tank to hook it to! It may never get this cold again in my lifetime but I have had to use it after some storms and when a drunk took down a pole by the local substation...
