08-19-2018, 04:04 AM
We had a big explosion right above our house at the same time the power went out, so thought it might be more localized. I tried calling Helco but gave up after 15 minutes on hold. The wife later learned the hold time was 90 minutes (who waits that long?) and the outage was widespread. I put electricity just to critical systems (refrigerator, flat screen, internet) with our golf cart batteries (solar power gathering under dark skies was virtually zero) for about 6 hours when our pressure tank ran dry, so I started up the generator and ran it about 2 hours while the batteries charged and we had whole house power (ceiling fan was nice). Just as I was getting ready to switch back to battery power for the night the grid came back. Outage was almost exactly 8 hours.
"HELCO generally knows who doesn't have power, within seconds of the outage"
I used to never bother calling them because power outages always remedied themselves. Then one time our power was out for half a day, we had checked with a neighbor (also out) and figured Helco was "on it". But using the internet everybody else was reporting no outage. The neighbor called Helco who reported there were no outages so that they would send a truck out. Sure enough, it was just a tiny localized outage only affecting a few customers and they didn't know about it. They told us if the power goes out to report it, otherwise they never know.
"HELCO generally knows who doesn't have power, within seconds of the outage"
I used to never bother calling them because power outages always remedied themselves. Then one time our power was out for half a day, we had checked with a neighbor (also out) and figured Helco was "on it". But using the internet everybody else was reporting no outage. The neighbor called Helco who reported there were no outages so that they would send a truck out. Sure enough, it was just a tiny localized outage only affecting a few customers and they didn't know about it. They told us if the power goes out to report it, otherwise they never know.