Florida Power Outage

[a1gutterman]

Ed in Tampa,
Were you effected by todays power outage? I see that you are on-line now (12:32am your time?). I heard that over 3 million were without power:eek: .

[Ed in Tampa]

No we use TECO Tampa Electric. My daughter is FPL customer and she lost her power for about 30 seconds which is almost an every day occurance in Florida.
The media doesn't have anything to talk about so they all jumped on this. Although I guess those in Miami lost power for a longer time.

In Florida with all the lightning strikes we get we lose power on a regular basis. For instance my power usually goes off momentarily every day at around 10:00 AM I have no idea why. You quickly learn to buy only battery backup electric clocks or else you spend your life setting clocks
Ed

[Ed in Tampa]

As a postscript to the power situation, I have often toyed with the idea of installing a magnetic power switch on my SS. Then if power dropped while I was cutting or something it wouldn't come back when power was restored and I had forgotten to flip the switch off.

I did this once using a sander. It wasn't a power failure but rather I had pulled the plug lose, the sander stopped and I looked up and saw the plug pulled out of the plug. I walked over and plugged it back in and to my horror watched the orbital sander begin to spin around. My first reaction was to quick grab the sander (instead of pulling the plug again) which by now had managed to fall off the bench. On the way down it did pull the plug again and I managed to grab the cord and frantically began reeling in line to keep the whole thing from crashing to the floor.

You know after telling many of my stories of mishaps in the shop I'm beginning to understand why the neighbors love to see me go into the shop. I'm entertaining them with my mishap antics. :eek:
Ed

[chettrick]

I live on the East coast and was affected by the power in our town. Miami power plants apparently had a fire and went offline. I work at a hospital and we immediately went to generator back up. A lot of the traffic lights were out for a while but eventually came back up with in a few hours.

[a1gutterman]

.......I did this once using a sander. It wasn't a power failure but rather I had pulled the plug lose, the sander stopped and I looked up and saw the plug pulled out of the plug. I walked over and plugged it back in and to my horror watched the orbital sander begin to spin around. My first reaction was to quick grab the sander (instead of pulling the plug again) which by now had managed to fall off the bench. On the way down it did pull the plug again and I managed to grab the cord and frantically began reeling in line to keep the whole thing from crashing to the floor........
Ed
Ed, I remember a time that I plugged in a belt sander that was sitting right side up, and it took off fast! It did no damage and no damage to it, so I was lucky. Those are the best lessons to learn; the ones where there are no pain!:D

[eldyfig]

My first reaction was to quick grab the sander (instead of pulling the plug again)


This happens to us. We want to go for the actual tool or equipment instead of the switch that sometimes is closer. On a different scale, one of the damage control scenarios we give new operators at the plant I work at is to shut off their feed pump in a mock power blip. First thing some want to do is go out the door and head straight for the pump instead of just trying to restart the controller right at their station. The longer the feed pump is off, the more out of alignment downstream equipment is going to get.