So this was a pretty bad one eh?
I have power now, we were out for about 22 hours and in that time we found out the following.
Our house gets cold pretty quickly, by the 20 hour mark we were down to 55F. We normally keep the house between 68-70F.
Despite the gas powered hot water heater, we didn’t have it. I will have to figure out why that is in the coming days.
Despite the gas fireplace in the basement, we couldn’t use it. It has an electric component (and a pilot light too?) that didn’t allow it to start. I will figure that one out soon as well.
Our neighborhood is down about 6-8 trees. The neighbors lost a 40-50 foot spruce at the 20 foot level. Impressive that it just snapped right in half and landed in their driveway. No discernible damage.
I haven’t looked at my roof closely yet, suppose I should, to see if any shingles are missing. Seems okay.
We did get some water coming into Abby’s playhouse early on Thursday night, I think it was from the rain pounding against the front door and being driven between the door jamb and the floor. Not sure if I am going to figure that one out soon.
Oh yeah, and our regular wood burning fireplace sucks more heat out of the house than it gives off, by a lot. We could feel the air rushing past our faces sucking out the fireplace. And the flu level is open all the way or closed all the way, I can’t meter it’s flow to try and get just the smoke but not the rest of the house.
You can see the tree we built our treehouse in when we were kids here on the rentonkayaker blog here. It didn’t make it this year.
RentonKayaker was almost RentonKayakless on this day.
I hope you have all weathered this event well and have just good stories, rather than bad news.
—–
UPDATE: I fixed the broken link on RentonKayaker blog above.
blief 
I think the water heater and furnace each use an electronic ignition in lieu of having a pilot light. This is a conservation thing that minimizes wasting gas just to ignite the flame when you really do need heat.
We have a 2200 watt gasoline-powered generator that I hooked into the circuit-breaker panel (AFTER FIRST OPENING THE MASTER BREAKER!!), opening all non-essential circuit breakers so that only the furnace and a few lighting circuits were the only ones loaded on the generator. Later, after the furnace motors had started and heat was flowing into the house, I was able to add the refrigerator to the load.
I got up at a little before 0700 on Saturday to crank up the generator to reheat the house. Before I stepped outside to pull the cord, I glanced down the hill and noted a house that had more than “candle-light” coming from its windows; I went back to the Panel and turned off the connection to the generator and flipped the master on and voila!! we had the furnace going!! Seattle City Light was once again connected to my house!
LikeLike
Our living room was also at about 55 degrees and I could see the dogs breath but not the humans. But we were cold! It’s a good lesson in what is important and how reliant we are upon debit cards (nobody took them), gas (lines up the wazzooo) and the like. The kids and I exhausted the name that tune game and what movie is this line from?. That took about an hour before the first “I’m bored” (s) kicked in. Aunt Theresa rescued us and let us warm up at her house. I hope that is the last storm for awhile!!
LikeLike
I couldn’t see any pictures from RentonKayaker’s website… it just linked me to sending him an email. 😦 I wanna see pics!
LikeLike