Daily Archives: February 17, 2021

Thawing Out . . . Kind of . . .

Our rolling blackout last night that started at 7:33pm ended almost exactly 3 hours later at 10:29pm. And so far tonight at 8pm, no reoccurrence.

And even better, by about 7pm tonight we finally have hot water again here at the hotel. It, of course, went out last night during our blackout and it took until this evening to catch up.

I suspect that the boiler is not really sized to consistently handle a full hotel load, since most of the time they’re not that full.

Jan and I drove over to the rig about 1pm to see how things were going. We were encouraged by the fact that the CenterPoint Outage Tracker site showed no outages in our area, but they were wrong once again.

Though we saw that the power was back on in locations closer to our park, it wasn’t back on for us. When I checked with our neighbor he said that the power had come back on for a few minutes yesterday, but it had been off ever since.

But on an up note, our water system had thawed out and seemed to be working fine now, with no leaks. We do have a 28° night coming up tomorrow, Thursday, and a 27° one on Friday, but since the system survived 16°, I doubt I’ll have any problems with what’s coming up.

Leaving the rig, we stopped off at Spring Creek BBQ for lunch before heading back to the hotel. When we left the food truck was back out in the hotel parking lot, so when we got back we got a funnel cake for breakfast tomorrow.

La Quinta Food Truck Funnel Cake

Looks delicious, and it was make to order while I waited.

I have this InkBird Smart remote thermostat hooked up to monitor our refrigerator temps while we’re away from home. It lets me check the temps, but also adjust the internal temp from anywhere, even when we were in Europe.

InkBird Smart

InkBird Smart Thermostat

Normally it connects to house AC and our MiFi, which also usually is powered by house AC. But with the power off, none of that worked.

So I moved the MiFi over to run off of the house batteries, hoping that when the AC came back up I would then be able to see the InkBird come online and I would be able to see it.

And a few minutes after 8pm it showed up, telling me the fridge temp was 35.2°. Since it wasn’t online at about 7, our power came back on somewhere between 7 and 8pm.

This also means that the heat lamp in the water bay should be back on, so I won’t have to worry about Thursday and Friday’s freeze.

But since we’re already set to stay here until Friday, we won’t go back to the rig until then.

Unless the power goes off again.


Thought For The Day:

There’s an old meme that says:

Be polite to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill them if necessary.

But that’s not a plan.

A plan is to also:

1. Eliminate Any Witnesses.
2. Know Where To Hide The Bodies
3. Have A Rock Solid Alibi

Now you’ve got a PLAN!