I can best describe the past three days as Chu Lai circa 1965: No lights at night, C Rations and warm Beer. We are safe as the QTH is 40M NW of downtown LA so there was no fire activity close up and personal. But the power company shut off the juice as a precaution. The 1st thing I did is make a cup of coffee and cooked some eggs in the microwave.
Let me not kid you the devastation in Los Angeles is on a scale of the bombed-out cities in Germany during WWII. Statements from one individual as to the cause are simply not validated and shows a lack of understanding. But hey you have to throw red meat to the followers on a regular basis so why not use a catastrophic event to whip up the crowd. Sad and this reflects the poor choice.
In an informal discussion with a couple of neighbors who after the last blackout went and bought some stuff. One neighbor spent $1100 for a system comprised of a battery, solar panel and an inverter. Another neighbor bought a 1500-watt gasoline generator. Both were less thrilled with the results.
The neighbor with the 1500-watt generator discovered that he suddenly had choices. He could feed the refrigerator and TV (Choice 1) or make a pot of coffee (Choice 2). But he could not make Choice 1 & 2 simultaneously.
The neighbor with the inverter soon found out that the solar panel would not fully charge the battery during daylight and so the inverter was only good for maybe two hours full up. The fix: He hauls the battery to his wife's place of work at about 4PM and charges the battery so he can get enough capacity to run the refrigerator and maybe the computer and TV.
I am looking to build a system and am thinking a 4KW pure sine wave inverter with four 100 amp LiPO batteries and for charging the batteries a dual system: House power to trickle charge the batteries and a 1KW gas or propane generator when the power is out for battery charging.
That outage has set my homebrew construction back a notch. You can think a lot on the dark but can't do any soldering.
73's
Pete N6QW