I think my method of stunning them with the back of the shovel, then the coup de grace with the block splitter is the problem. Tough little buggers. You really need a solid rock underneath as bricks inevitably split.
Naah, the local council will take them for free and if wild moggy turns out to be someones cut puddy that just escaped that night, then there is no evidence.
Unfortunaely, our local council takes a dim view of recycling anything organic and has actually passed a law requring all captured cats to be surrendered. Also gives me the opportunity of retail therapy to get over the of sending puddies to the death. As we leave the pound "while we are over this way...." can be used -).
I just wish she would not pass around the pictures of me of my playing with feral kittens to make them cute and cuddly to maximise their adoption chances at the pound. I guess that is another fringe benefit.
I'm on Energy Australia's network. Significant outgages are not that common, but they do happen. A friend was without power for an extended period because of the Chatswood substation fire in 1999. That fire affected 23,000 people.
There are annecdotal reports of transformers being subject to ad-hoc cooling with fire hoses to prevent them from overheating. This doesn't lend confidence that the infrastructure is up to the task of handling high temperatures.
Part of Victoria's recent power problem arose because Basslink apparently cannot operate at full capacity in high ambient temperatures (that is, exactly when it's likely to be most needed).
And of course, from the USA and UK and Europe (Switerland/Italy) we've seen how power systems can have cascading failures that can take 24 hours to put right. Thought at least we're not likely to see outages caused by freezing rain.
After the UK had its huge windstorm some 20 years back, some country properperties were without power for a couple of weeks. I my self was without power for 12 hours or so. One doesn't realise just how dependent one is on power until it goes off. Even our stove was electric. I ended up making tea by sticking a cup of water next to a gas fire (I prefer electric fan heaters. I'd kept the gas connected, and paid the service charge, just in case).
I also lived in the UK during a year long miners' strike, and we had rotating blackouts lasting three hours on several nights a week. That was a real pain.
Here in NSW we were fortunate that the heatwave occurred most severely at the weekend when power demands tend to be lower. Had it occurred a couple of days earlier, NSW reserves would have been stretched.
And of course there's the bushfire season, where bushfires can compromise transmission lines (and did so last year, or perhsp a few years before - Parliament House got cut off!).
My main concern is an extended power loss during a worse heatwave then the one we've just had. I'm not trying to run the entire house - just the study, with its airconditioning and computers, which has a floor big enough to drag a a matress or too into to sleep on if the outgage continues into the night.
How much it's really worth spending on protecting against something that may never happen, well that's another question, but the price is not just to address the issue when it arises, it's, like insurance, to provide assurance that the risk is being managed, one way or the other.
On Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:19:02 +1100, Sylvia Else wrote: hs so the supply's not exactly parlous where I am.
I just worry about my own provider. If I was in the countryside anywhere, then I would regard a number of diesel generators as absolutely essential.
It really vcomes down to economic rationalism. If you can bill $500 per hour, then your own serious UPS with backup generator and
250litre fuel tank is probably justifiable*.
But if this is just a home userwith an internet adiction, then a laptop with prepaid wireless access and spending the night in the knocking shop, woops Formula 1 motel probably makes a lot more sense. Telstra has one of their WAP accesspoints just across the road from the knock shop at McChuckies.
The trouble is where do you stop? Most people do not think about where they are going to store the 20, 40, 60l of petrol. Someone thought of running his on mains gas, but what do you do if we have a WA supply incident. You could end up with more money invested than in your house.
Though that can turn out to be needless upheaval for what turns out to be only a 2 hour outage.
A mains gas outage is only an issue there if the power goes off at the same time. Could happen, I suppose, but it's not very likely.
The problem with storing petrol is that it goes off. There are additives, but even then the life is only one or two years. So you keep having the recycle the stuff. I was looking at LPG. Even a 3kg tank would run a 2KW generator for 6 hours (according to the specs). Also, you can to go your local servo and do a tank swap even if the power is out (which stops the petrol pumps).
Really. I was under the imprssion that it wasn't a problem in Australia for small motors. I'm currently on the last 5l of 20L purchased 3 years ago and the shredder is happy.
That is only a problem when you have misplaced the funnel and have to pout it on the side of the empty vehcile and hope that most of it ends up in the tank.
What brand and model of generator? I last asked Advance Power a decade ago and they said $400 on top of the generator price to have it converted.
**LOL! Sorry, I just had a vision of that Cheech And Chong movie, where they filled the gas tank of a classic 1970s car (convertible Mustang, if I'm not mistaken) from a garbage can. They, too, failed to use a funnel (or a filter). They results, when lighting a joint, were, er, explosive.
I've just received a reply to my email asking about price, to be told that they do not make a LPG 2.2KVA generator any longer, with their smallest LPG model being a 7.5KVA.
It's only a real problem with higher compression and especially with higher octane fuels. The more volatile components evaporate first. You should run the engine every now and then in any case, so that burns a little fuel.
Some fridge compressor motors are very frequency sensitive, forget which type though, and can easily burn out when running off generator power unless the frequency is close to 50Hz. I expect an inverter type generator would solve this though.
Not to mention fungal growths in the tropics, especially with distillate.
There is some common food preservative that allows fuel to be stored free of bacteria and fungus: a spoonful per 200L drum.
It may be worth check what your household insurance states about stored fuel and natural gas bottles: they have been getting weird lately in that regard.
That was being done in QLD by energex IIRC. The courier mail picked up on it and actually published photos of those green sprinkler hoses being used to cool down transformers at a substation.
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