Saturday was a blustery November day and according to news sources, at one time more than 50,000 homes in New Hampshire were without power.  We joined those ranks just as I was washing the conditioner out of my hair.  The lights fluttered and faltered and eventually the whole house went dark. It was bound to happen, live in these parts for any period of time and you WILL loose power while you are in the shower.

Losing power used to freak me out.  Although my husband and his family could take it in stride, a mild sense of panic would descend on me and I’d run around looking for candles, matches and flashlights.  After close to 7 years, I can honestly say I’m almost getting used to it.  I think some of the comfort comes from knowing what to expect and understanding what is needed to keep day-to-day life going without “the juice”.

I really cut my teeth during the floods of 2007. We were without power, phone and Internet for almost 4 days and the timing could not have been worse as I was staring down major work deadlines. We were fortunate to borrow a generator 1 day in, but it only powered the bare essentials, heat, water, the refrigerator and one light over the kitchen sink. Immediately after the storm, we started researching generators with the intent of purchasing our own.   Once you return to normal life, and the chaos fades, it is easy to put a major purchase like that on the back burner.  I forgot all about it until one fall day when my son came screeching into the house.  “Mommy, Daddy bought you a present!”  I made my way outside to the truck to find our very own generator.  My glee at the purchase surprised me.

We’ve used it several times most notably during the ice storms of ‘08 and once we got our power back, it made the rounds to friends and family until their lights came on. The catch has been that every time we wanted to use it, there needed to be some serious rewiring done before we fired it up.  Just last week, we made arrangements with Nathan Poland from Univolt, LLC, to come today and install the necessary plugs and wiring to make the transition smoother. Yeah, the irony wasn’t lost on us either as the wind howled.

As I type this, Nathan is in the basement toiling away. When all is said and done, I will supposedly be able to fire up this sucker all by myself. I think I can feel my city-kid roots withering away just a little bit.

What is your best/worst power outage story?

Nathan Poland is a Certified Master Electrician and the owner of Univolt, LLC, a an authorized dealer of Generac whole house automatic and portable generators (ours is not a Generac).  If you are interested in learning more about emergency power sources, please contact him at 603-254-4023 or univoltllc (at) gmail (dot) com and tell him you read it here! This information is posted purely as a courtesy to my readers, I received no compensation for mentioning Univolt, LLC.