Power seems to go out once a day; is this normal for over here? Noticed 2 trucks working the poles after 10PM last night. Also heard of a "brown out" in Ellijay so I wonder if the heat has something to do with it.

Hi Kip,
Was at my cabin in Dial this past weekend, lost power two times sat. night
for about 3hrs. total.
Welcome to the adventure area!
Carver

Thanks CARVER! It seems I might have to expedite my project of running a portion of the office on solar power. Instead of forking over the dough for a noisy backup generator, it seems I could use solar-charged batteries for aux power. Anybody doing this? DIY?

We are off Aska Road also. We have to reset the oven clock every week because of power outages.

Already complaining??? Just joking, Wait till a (good?) storm blows through or a winter storm. Cabin’s (houses) out on Aska are not on the top of the repair list. You can go for days without power. We have a timer at our cabin on for a dehumidifier and it seems to be off about 2-5 hours when we are gone for more then 4 months.
Battery clocks work the best.
I have a solution for the oven clocks; put tape over it.
Sundials are also good.

Kip, Honda makes very quite generators. The EU2000 (you can barely hear it running) will run a frig. and a 5000 BTU AC unit along with lights. 2 gallons of gas lasts about 8 hours. I have 2 generators at home down here in Hurricane alley. 6500 watts for the hot water heater and oven (day time only) and the 2000 watt for at night.

It's been a great week down here in Miami (NOT), 2 Police Officers murdered on duty in 2 different incidents.
Guy

Guy,The problem with tape over the oven clock is the fact that it is also our timer. We have to reset our microwave clock also - which is also a timer that is not loud enough to hear. Maybe tape on the microwave clock will work.All of our other clocks are battery operated or battery backup.We have never been out of power more than a few minutes. We are only 2 miles out Aska from Ace so I would think we are easier to repair than out by the bridge.

Hello Steve,
The tape thing was a joke (sorry), I try not to be to serious on this form.
My wife and I have to change both the oven and microwave clock as often as you all do. A small price to pay to live in the beautiful BR mountains.
This year has in fact been better, the years past we would loose power for hours out on Flat Creek River Rd. (6 miles out Aska) some times for no reason.

I have been spending my Summers, Falls and Springs (Winter's you can have)in BR for just under 40 years (1968), thanks to the good Lord. I remember when Aska was a dirt road after about 2 miles, and you could get gas right by where Kip is at now. Mr. Cecil Weaver had a gas station and a small store across the road from the bridge. Its now a Tube / Cabin / small Dinner / pay for parking lot if you want to leave your car across the street to go down the river place now.
I hope you and the family are having a GREAT summer.

Guy

Guy,I knew you were joking. However, you did start making me think about the trouble it is every week. The reality is who cares what time it is when you are up here in the mountains. I get great pleasure watching the sun rise over the mountains. This can only be beat by a full moon rising.I partially agree with you about the winters. They are great for a long weekend, sitting in front of the fire and reading a book. Sitting in the hot tub with the snow flurries coming down is also great. But it is difficult to plan for those events. The winter weekends are not fun with a power outage caused by a storm. I have some friends who have a cabin in the Dial area. Back in '93 they saw that snow was headed this way so they drove up from Atlanta to play in it over the weekend. They got 3' of snow and lost power. This also meant they lost water from the well and could not build a fire in their fan powered Buck Stove. It was 5 days before their 4x4 could get out.I'm sure you have some great stories from over the last 40 years. I only discovered this area 18 years ago. I bought my property the first weekend I came up here. This was before 515 was finished.Steve

I think this year has been better because the power companies were pretty aggressive with trimming back anything near power lines last fall. I don't know how often they do that, but there was definitely a large investment down my way (hwy 60 south) in hacking back any growth around the main lines. If that's just a 5 year thing, then I expect it we'll be good for a few years till the growth comes back and the ice storms hit.

Some of my equipment is powered by Tri-State. They have a horrible track record. An outage at least every two days in Morganton! Meanwhile, my BRMEMC on Star Creek has only about 3 blips a year!

__________________
Ralph Fowler
http://Brightlan.net
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Ditch TDS and ETC!