Weather maps

You miss her, don't you?

 

Some of us will never know what you are talking about...

 

Oh, man. LOL!

 

I miss her too

 

Argh. "They" say we're due here in S Florida. It's been 6 years since we welcomed Katrina and Wilma.

 

Fortunately, hurricanes are not a huge issue up here - although we did have one go through a few years back. Rain, thunder, lightning and power outages are a different story - this is going to be the wettest August in history up here, and we've lost power three times in the last 4 days. That, my friends, makes this a good opportunity to share some technology Rob Hallgren (li'l frog) turned me onto:

OK. I have a generator that can power my greenhouse, well pump and several other circuits in the house, but it has to be manually started and the power transferred from the line. Not fun at 3 am when it's raining, or worse, snowing.

I recently invested in a marine, deep-cycle battery and an inverter that turns DC to AC. The particular inverter I got also has a charger and an automatic transfer switch.

So...when we lose power (the first of out 3 recent times was ~45 minutes after I installed it all), it switches the connected items over to battery power, and on they run. Power is restored, it switches back and continues recharging the battery.

Right now it's only the fans, but I'll add the heater and lights later. The peak draw (startup) on the fans and heater are about 5A, so I could have gotten away with a 750W inverter, but Mr. "Nothing Exceeds Like Excess" went with 2x that, and the battery is good for about 24 hours at peak current draw, or maybe 2.5 days when everything is running - plenty of time to get up, have coffee and fire up the generator - if I still need to.

 

Looks like you got lucky again. feel anything from Irene yet?

 

Yes, VERY lucky!! Just a bit breezy right now, Tom. Looks like a band is headed our way, though. It shouldn't be anything damaging.

 

It looks like we are going to get hit this time. I don't expect it will be stronger than Cat. one though by the time it reaches here... I need help to move all my 300+ warm growers inside the garage soon.

 

seen this site:
http://spaghettimodels.com/

 

Our local news website has a nice hurricane section. This is my go-to site for hurricane info. Max Mayfield, the recently-retired director of the National Hurricane Center, is the hurricane specialist, and he writes a blog which can be found on this site, too.

http://miami.justweather.com/hurricane/

Good luck everyone on the eastern coast!

 

Good to see you Ray, How was Issac? Hopefully it wan't a huge issue for you either?