On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 11:44:10 EST "Steve Bonine" wrote in
article

On 12/18/13, 7:43 AM, Bill Horne wrote:
Fellow hams,

It's that time of year again, and old man winter is piling up
obligations for me as I type. For those in the snowbelt, I'd like to
have another discussion about generators and alternatives to commercial
power.

I've read this thread, and the question it raises for me is different.
You folks who have invested significant money into these devices - do
you think it was a reasonable investment? (I expect a lot of "yes"
answers for the obvious reason.)

73, Steve KB9X

I'm _very_ glad to have bought the generator. In the past 10 years or so
we have had outages of a week or more. Irene and Ken devastated the area
a few years ago; Sandy didn't cause as large a problem as I&K, but we
were without electricity for 2 1/2 days anyway.

Over the past 10 years or so, the frequency and duration of outages has
increased steadily, despite a lot of tree trimming by our local utility.
Friends who worked for said utility confirmed my suspicion that as their
profits shrank, they basically quit performing maintenance and just fixed
things when they broke and so were overwhelmed when a big storm hit. Oh,
and RFI is at an all-time high around here which I think also reflects
"deferred" maintenance. The utility company in question sold off bits and
pieces of itself for years until finally they took a buyout by a Canadian
utility this fall. I don't know how that will affect grid reliability,
but I'm skeptical.

WA2LJW