Well, yesterday about 3:45pm the lights simply went OUT. And not just me, or even my neighborhood. MOST of San Diego county, and parts of several other counties and perhaps even as far as Arizona, where the 'Eastern' power feed to San Diego comes from. The Northern feed from Orange county went down, too, taking out part of Orange county.
NO stereo. NO TV. Quiet and dark. We sat on the back patio (NO AC, either!) and player cards. I fired up the AM radio for news. No cold drinks. (we didn't touch the fridge at all) I unplugged everything and even flipped the AirConditioner breaker, so it wouldn't 'surge' when power was restored. I brought in the outside rechargeable LED lawn light for some light, broke out the flashlights and candles. It was VERY quiet. Traffic on the nearby streets was at a trickle. By about 6pm, most everyone had made it home and reported nightmare conditions. The next door neighbor reported a 45" drive, which normally takes no longer than 15". All the neighbors got together for a good chat. A few of us have been here for 20+ years and know each other fairly well. UFOs? Bad Guys? Some kind of Cascade error? I listened to ShortWave after everyone had retired. In short order I got China 'Peoples' Republic, Japan (NHK) and than Taiwan. There was NO radio noise at all and the strong Asian signals were fade free and clear. I didn't need to resort to any advanced tuning aids or even a long wire antenna. I could hear WWV on 5mhz, 10mhz, AND 15mhz, all at the same time. Very unusual since the hi frequencies are considered 'daytime' while the low frequencies are best at night, and the later the better, at that. I read for a while than 'lights' out. I had the idea to turn on the window fan. It woke me up about 0300 when the power came back on. Not even 12 hours and we were back up. As I write, a few pockets remain without power but the worst is over. Neat evening, though. The Figs from the tree provided desert, water from the tap at whatever temp and a prevailing quiet. The only hint I had was that in the previous 3 or 4 days, I noted powerline voltage down below 115v for the first time ever. And while we had near 100' temps here at the house, it was nothing like Texas is/was getting or even just 100miles away, over in either Borrego or Palm.....Springs, where temps ended up in the teens....at least. My cousin lives out in Pahrump which is an hours drive from Death Valley, so I'm guessing it was pretty warm there, too.
I'm good for about 10 hours of tunes at typical listening levels with the power out. I plug the cdp or tt into a battery pack, and the Red Wine amp runs on its own. If the outage was for longer I could recharge the battery pack from the car or van, and then go another 10 hours.
Yeah, I ran thru a couple of car battery / invertor scenarios and decided to just go with the SW radio. The TOTAL lack of any RF interference of ANY kind was too tempting. I'd never heard such lack of noise on SW ever, and I've been listing since the 60s. I was able to hear WWV from Ft. Collins Colorado on all three broadcast freuquencies. 5, 10 and 15mhz. The tranmitter is 10kw, which is peanuts. The 2.5 and 20mhz broadcasts were un hearable, and only 2.5kw which is nearly in ham radio territory. I didn't even try for WWVH. The Hawaiian outlet from Kawaii can be heard sometimes when WWV is silent. WWV goes silent at very specific times and I HAVE heard WWVH, but only once. When I lived back east, Europe and North African stations were easily heard. South American and Carribean Islands were big, too. Radio Havanna and Radio Moscow came in like they were next door....and this was from Chicago!