I was wondering how you had faired, TurnerF. Glad to hear that you are OK, and hopefully you'll have power back soon. I think the thermostat at home read about the same when we left yesterday evening. I think my sister-in-law's apartment was somewhere around 95 Sunday evening when we collected her cats -- second floor apartment in midtown, no insulation to speak of.

Fridge cleaning does take on a different sort of approach, doesn't it? It looks like ours was just delivered to us, rather than being three or four years old. Spotless and completely bare. It should also make the next trip to the grocery store easier. "Do we have any of this?" "If it lives in the fridge, then no." Vacuuming poses a bit more of a challenge, though...

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

[This message has been edited by gonk (edited July 29, 2003).]

I can appreciate your frustration. I live in Rockford Il. On July 5 at 4:30 am we also had a severe storm. In a town of 140K people 80K were with out power. We went 4.5 days with out power. We were all lucky as no one was hurt. Our community had much damage from downed trees and we are still cleaning up from the storm.

Well, we may get a good (or bad) demonstration of the capabilities of a Panamax MAX5100 whenever MLGW decides to send somebody to east Memphis to start restoring power around my house. I had a co-worker in midtown with a very nice older two-channel rig (Spectral Audio pre-amp and amp, along with I believe a Meridian CD player and a new pair of B&W Nautilus 805's) and found when his power came back Wednesday that a good bit of it was dead. It sounds like the amp may have survived and I haven't heard about the CD, but the pre-amp, VCR, and TV were completely non-responsive. Then I discovered this morning thanks to my little generator that my microwave suffered a similar fate (the display lights up, but it scrolls gibberish and the buttons don't do anything). The home theater's on a dedicated circuit and protected by a Panamax MAX5100, so we'll see if any of it was damaged once I get power back. It may be a bit of a wait to find out, though, as I don't much like the idea of putting the HT on a generator and after over ten days (we're now at 242 hours since the power went out at home) there's still not been any utility crews in my neighborhood. The school across the street is back, but once that was done they pretty much disappeared, and not once has the utility company's list of areas being worked in included our area. As of last night, there were still 59,000 customers out. They've averaged 5,000 to 10,000 a day all this week. My math says that means they've got at least another week's work to do, possibly ten more days. Not good...

Oh, we did get declared a federal disaster area late Tuesday.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

[This message has been edited by gonk (edited August 01, 2003).]

Gonk,

That’s an amazing storm to take this long to restore pwr. My tendency is to crack jokes over those hard to live with situations but your posts are sobering when I reflect there was loss of life in this storm.

We had one like your pics years ago and the neighborhood next to me with 200 yr old trees looked for all the world like a war zone. All streets were impassable through the area for days and tree crews were running all day and night. This too was “straight line winds” Does it really matter if its a circular rotation or straight when they do that kind of damage? During that storm we did not lose a tree but at one point I saw all windows in line of sight, - suck in and bow (without breaking) during a gust. Very impressive.

I will be waiting with bated breath to see how your Panamax handled it. I still have only the P5300 (same protection level as yours) guarding my system, of course each neighborhood in your area could have had different levels of spike depending on what came down the line when the power failed. Your microwave loss (like mine during a storm) is what sent me scrambling for some protection when I first purchased all the new Outlaw gear. But I still want more,….I hope sincerely the Panamax was the stopgap it needed to be for you.

I’m usually not a ‘mail order’ type, (amazing I wanted to demo the Outlaw bad enough to overcome this reservation). Most “ship from” companies don’t have the excellent level of after sale support that Outlaw sports. I keep thinking I’ll get around to finding some shops in town where I can pick up some additional protection (Panamax for parents/friend/ Brickwall for me). I need to get on it and just pick some web-sites to bulk order from.

SLL,

It's interesting that the admittedly more common tornadoes and hurricanes get a lot of attention and research, but these thunderstorms and straight-line winds just sort of pop up and tear stuff up (which they do very effectively -- I've seen the results of one similar to what you describe, where a single neighborhood is thrashed, and it's equal parts humbling and horrifying to see) with almost no warning or discussion afterward.

As long as you're waiting for word about the Panamax with bated breath and not held breath, we should have some good info for you one of these days -- but probably not before holding your breath would get uncomfortable. The lastest web update from the utility indicates that they finally noticed that one corner of town inside the loop is still heavily damaged and decided to start sending some crews over there (you know, after only ten or eleven days). They indicate that my general area has 8,000 of the remaining powerless customers, in what they call "pockets of outages" (funny, I call it entire neighborhoods). The work crews and police have done an absolutely excellent job of restoring the city to some semblance of normalcy, but after watching the utility company management direct crews to every corner of the county except the several square miles in which I live I've begun to lose patience with them (as my posts today may have hinted at). Oh, well, I'll just sit at home with fans, a refrigerator that works, a lobotimized microwave, a snake-pit of extension cords, and a DVD player hooked up to an old 10" TV until they hook us back up.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

Some good news here. Work crews rolled into our neighborhood yesterday afternoon, and at around 7:45 last night they turned our entire street back on. Cable's still out, so I'm posting from dial-up on mrs. gonk's laptop, but I just really can't bring myself to be bothered by that little detail. I'm just glad to have air conditioning and lights back. There's still a lot of damage along one major street near us (Walnut Grove), but they started working on a two or three-mile stretch of it yesterday.

The Panamax did a good job. The home theater gear came through without so much as a hiccup. The microwave actually works too, as it turns out, if you don't mind not being able to read the display. We'll deal with it once we recover from the storm.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review

The Panamax did a good job Un bates breath, timely, I was turning a lovely shade of blue!

Is the Microwave LCD scrambled or blank?. I had an LCD on an early generation programmable thermostat that in the winter would scramble if you forgot to discharge static electricity before touching the unit. (which in turn took the furnace off-line!) Additionally storms scrambled it a few times, usually this condition only lasted hours although once overnight but then returned to duty before we replaced it. Finally a big storm took it out, which roused himself to replace the finicky thing.
Another year a coffee maker did the same with the LCD at first blanked out then coming back on line after days. First it was gibberish then sorted itself out to the correct display. Did this a couple of times

Welcome back to the modern world of artificial illumination and automation!

I gotta question for you...now that your system survived (woohoo!) and the Panamax undoubtably took a hit...is it trustworthy for another hit? Does it degrade or fail outright?

In the Microwave...if you did plan on replacing it if the LED does not work, you have a few interesting options...there could be some capacitors that retain charge that are keeping it from re-setting itself. Try a long period of unpluggedness...if that does not work, you could crack it open in manually discharge the caps (if you know how to do it safely) but that may fry what is left of the electronics. All and all, it seems that you and your family made it through as well as can be expected and I am sure your extented Outlaw family is glad for you!

Did not realize you were from Memphis, gonk. That is where I grew up. My dad and brother are still there. My brother had very bad damage to his yard and house in the same storm. Heis in the Germantown area. Good luck getting back up to speed. I lived without electricity when I lived through Alicia in Houston. Kids loved it; ice cream was melting so I stuck a straw in two one gallon containers and told them to go after it. That was more fun than listening to my 950.

Like Smart Little Lena's thermostat and coffee maker, my microwave has recovered. It took a couple of days, but by late Sunday (just before our part of town was turned back off for an hour, presumably to complete repairs in the area) it was back to normal. We started to re-stock the fridge Sunday -- and enjoyed noting the items that were hard to find at the store, like mayonaisse. Cable TV came back Saturday night, too, so once we get the yard cleaned up and the house back in order we'll be more or less back to normal. The brush piles stacked in front of almost every house in town will probably take at least six weeks to get collected, and there are still around 9,000 customers without power (from an original total now placed at 338,000 rather than the 306,000 reported at first).

Now that the power's back, I'm starting to experiment with a new gadget -- a Panasonic DMR-E80 DVD recorder. And enjoying air conditioning, lights, refrigerators, and all the other little conveniences we are so fortunate to have.

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gonk -- Saloon Links | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | 950 Review