Just had a 3hr power cut... and

[lenny59]

God ....Yeah....Never thought about power cuts and E-Cigs . . . . My batteries will always be fully charged from now on

[Bluefish]

Backups Raffles, backups lol It's great when the power goes off, we don't get them so often now but a few years ago when they were building the new school we had them all the time, candles out, can still get internet on phones or get a book out, saves on the leccy bill

[chykensa]

And there was I, thinking that the fact that our kettle has tonight finally given up the ghost after almost 20 years of faithful service was something to whinge about! Glad it's all sorted now with regard to the power cut - oh, and it'll be me out at sparrow's fart tomorrow morning to the local Tesco Extra to buy a new kettle - hope I settle for the right coloured kettle (come back Tim Rice!)
Andy

[OneDay]

Apr 21, 2013 19:08:35 GMT Raffles said:

Makes you think it wouldn't take much to turn us back to the 'dark ages'... how did they cope?

Never mind the dark ages - remember the three-day weeks in the 70's?

[farzooks]

Living in the sticks here, I'm quite used to the power going off but there's usually some warning from the weather. There are always candles in a drawer and the flashlights are always kept charged up. Cooking is by bottled gas anyway, so no hassle there. The last major outages during the two or three severe winters of recent memory, I simply connected the van's battery up to an inverter and fed the TV, lights and UPS for the PC up to its output. Sheer bloody luxury. Heating was provided by a standby stove which also heats the copper cylinder. So, all in all, we just carried on as normal.
This past winter there have been no cuts as the rural network was substantially upgraded in recent times and all those rotting poles ready to be blown over and the dodgy, prehistoric wires and insulators have been replaced, too.
I've been stocking up on flashlights anyway, as a new small hobby - it's remarkable what you can buy for under a tenner nowadays, and have 60 lithium cells in charged condition ready to go at any time. I've also built a couple of long-life workshop lights, which run for many hours on three or four cells.
ps, with that number of lithium cells, I have no worries about keeping my Vamo or LTs going