The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Here’s “Lil’ Red,” a generator we bought from a friend of the family a few years back, which I have lovingly maintained for the past couple of years. We finally put it to use during Hurricane Milton to keep the fridge and freezer cold, to power cooking appliances and provide that tiny bit of power that our gas-powered tankless water heater needs, and to power wifi (our Frontier fiber connection stayed up almost the entire time) and laptops and charge phones.

I haven’t put Lil’ Red away just yet because no power restoration is perfect. We got power back on Saturday afternoon, but lost it later that evening due to problems with a nearby tree falling on a power line. We’ve got it back Sunday afternoon, but there’ve been reports of occasional hours-long outages, which is understandable considering the scope of Milton’s damage. I’ll put it away this weekend after first running the engine dry to remove the remaining gasoline — gas degrades over time, and storing a generator with gas in the tank is asking for a lot of cleaning and repair later.

I’m also looking at this bad boy pictured above for future use, as this one can be hooked up to our natural gas line, and I’d like to be able to use the additional watts to run a couple of fans and recharge our EcoFlow power station…

A day or two after Hurricane Milton tore its way through town, someone posted on the local Facebook groups offering their services to fly a drone over your house to check for roof damage — for $75.00.

You can also do what I did and get roughly the same effect for FREE with your smartphone and a long pole or board, as pictured in this post.

I write mobile apps for fun, and I keep a couple of old Android phones handy, as they have all sorts of uses, such as hurricane FM radios (I’ll write about this in a later post) and cameras that I don’t feel too bad about putting at risk.

So I took one of my old Androids — a Moto x4, which was a great mid-range phone that offered a lot of bang for the buck back in 2017 — and securely taped it to a long slat from a the renovation project from when we moved in. I knew it would come in handy someday.

You might be tempted to use duct tape, but I figured that for a half-hour’s use, the annoyance of having to peel it off the phone wasn’t worth it. I used masking tape from the spot in our utility closet that I call the “attach things to other things shelf” (if you don’t have one, you might want to establish one).

Tape it in a way so that you can use the controls on your phone’s “camera” app, set it to video, start recording, and raise the pole! You can extend the viewing angle and reach by standing on a ladder.

Here’s a sample from my recordings:

A good chunk of today was devoted to cleaning up all the tree and plant debris left in Milton’s wake. I’m grateful to have to do it — the canopy of trees over our ’hood probably absorbed a lot of the hurricane’s energy and blunted the force that would’ve been applied to us and our homes.

Pictured above: me — below: Anitra!

The stillness and silence from earlier this morning in our Old Seminole Heights neighbourhood broke at around 8:30 when people started going out and about to assess the damage, walk their dogs, check in on their neighbors, and…fire up the generators.

Our plan is to eventually get a whole-house natural-gas powered generator, but for now, “Li’l Red,” whose primary purpose is to keep the fridge and freezer cold, is on active duty.

On a full tank of gas, Li’l Red can power the fridge/freezer, phones, and wifi for five hours, and it can also power our convection oven and lower-power backup microwave.

I always have 10 gallons (38 litres) of ethanol-free gasoline in canisters for emergencies, along with enough air conditioner-grade outdoor extension cords to run power to any part of the house from the generator outside.

This is Li’l Red’s first full-on use, and so far, she’s been performing admirably.

I was still tired after waking up at 5:45 and writing the previous post, so I went back to sleep for a couple more hours. I had a dream in which I woke up, checked my phone and saw it was 9:03 a.m., and went to survey the damage outside my house. Just as I stepped out the door…

…I woke up. I checked my phone for the time.

8:54 a.m. Close enough, I thought.

The only really worrying thing was the oak branch pictured below:

We have a one-car garage, where our nicer one lives. Our older one, a 2014 Nissan Rogue with less than 70,000 miles on it, lives outside.

Here’s a closer look:

Despite all appearances, the branch wasn’t making much contact with the car, and it didn’t even look scratched.

With the help of our neighbor Michael, who held the branch in place, I backed the car out, leaving this:

That looked a little precarious, but we had a stepladder handy to hold the bottom of the branch in place. That’ll have to do until we can get our hands on a saw or tree service to help:

As for the car: it looks good!

No picture with this post, because there’s no light.

After getting used to the sound of howling winds, pummeling rain, and the occasional “thunk” of debris hitting the roof, it was the utter silence that woke me up at 5:45 a.m.. With the power out, the constant hum of the air conditioning — a necessity in Florida — isn’t there. We’re on a residential street, but a block away from a major thoroughfare that leads straight downtown. Even on a normal day, there’s the occasional car or early morning dog walker — not today. No bird songs, either.

The air in the house is still cool. Hardly surprising; we ran the air conditioner a little colder and didn’t open any doors in anticipation that the power would go out. The sun hasn’t come up yet, and even if it had, it’d be hard to see through the hurricane fabric covering the windows.

It’s just darkness and silence. It’s rather nice.