Update from the war stricken village of.. Snow! Snow! Not war!

Olé! So, I’m stuck in bed ill at the moment, though luckily we’ve got a backup generator running my house at the minute…

Backup generator you say? Yea… Because of the snow falling on trees that have leaves etc, loads of trees and branches have come down, destroying powerlines throughout Yorkshire. The only confirmed number of houses without power I got was 12,000 houses, though the entire of Whitby and Saltburn were also down, so it could be a few more than that…

Anyways, here out in YO21 we’re not exactly on the top of the list for fixing power lines, and there are still 1700 homes without power:

 

So, how has this affected us? Botton wide there isn’t a huge impact overall, the internet is clearly still up (… Yea, Hi!) because the centre and North Neighbourhoods have big generators capable of powering the whole neighbourhood. All the other neighbourhoods are reliant on their little generators that some houses or farms have.

In the South Neighbourhood we have 2 generators, one gas generator for the farm, and a diesel generator on wheels which can power maybe 2 houses at once…

So, this is our farm generator:

(It can do 16.5A at 240v, apparently…)

However, as you can see, it looks like it was left over from the first world war… And during morning milking it didn’t work at all… Gilberto came and got me out of bed at 7, after he’d spent 2 hours trying to get it to work, and we hand milked our cows…

In the afternoon we spent a lot of time trying to get the generator to work, and finally sort of figured it out, the Farm Workshop had a go and replaced the fuel pipe, and it sort of worked..

We managed to milk with the machines, though only just, when the vacuum pump kicked in the generator really struggled… And occasionally it’d just slow all the way down, switching off the vacuum pump as it did so, the only way to bring it back to life would be to shake the gas bottle… Great designed system!

Anyway, we managed to machine milk them all in the end.

For supper I went out to the industrialised North Neighbourhood to see my mother at first, with their fancy generators, so I actually had power for a bit, charged my phone, which was down to 11% battery… (I’d been switching it on, using the camera and switching it straight back off again, I’m surprised it lasted that long)

I had asked Giberto if he needed me to be available in the morning (This morning) in case everything went wrong, and sadly he said yes, so I had to leave my girlfriend in  her warm house,with her electric lights, and venture back, nursing the beginnings of a cold to my little room with no heating or lights….

I managed to make a herb tea using the gas cooker and a candle… Woo!

Then today I woke up ill, I struggled through part of the morning routine, but was feeling too rough and requested time off… So here I am, nursing some sort of upper respiratory tract infection and hoping it doesn’t go into a headache otherwise I’m likely to be down and out for a week….