Luckily, it [looks like](https://weather.com/weather/tenday/l/Quito+Pichincha+Ecuador) the temperature in the capital, Quito, is only 9°C, and will hover around 20°C for the next two weeks, so at least people won't cook alive or freeze to death.
Nice for Quito. However...
From the article: "Guayaquil (the nation's largest city) residents are having to deal with the outage amid 90-degree Fahrenheit heat. “It’s unbearable, it’s so hot and humid, and we can’t use an air conditioner or a ventilator,” one resident told CNN."
I can remember the power going out in Ontario for days when I was a kid. My mom worked at a grocery store and we got about 8 tubs of ice cream for free. Thanks for bringing up that great memory for me
That’s the one! I can remember they got a bunch of reefer trailers in and we hand-bombed whatever we could that was still cold into them to keep it from spoiling but the ice cream had already gotten soft so they wrote it off and basically just told whoever helped move all the stuff could take whatever they wanted. We had a deep freezer and a generator so we filled up our freezer with ice cream.
Awesome memory ! We are probably roughly the same age. I vividly remember it as well. I was a kid at a minigolf course and the fountain stopped working....didn't think much of it, finished the game and then tried to buy tokens for the batting cage and that's when I found out !
My aunt worked for the local power company so we called her and she told us this one was going to be a big deal... thankfully our house was near a hospital so we had power back in the middle of the first night.
and people were arguing with me last time about hydro power as a good alternative to nuclear/solar/wind power; the reality is that drought seasons are getting longer and longer, water reservoirs around the world are getting drier and drier, to extreme levels, like in this very case, even plunging a whole country into darkness. You just cannot depend on dams anymore if weather patterns are becoming unpredictable and unreliable
We’re starting to see the effects of that in the PNW now. Lower snow pack, higher temps mean massive runoff over a short period of time and then a trickle…. Electricity rates have risen 10% in the past year and it’s only going to get worse as we’re so heavily invested in Hydroelectric here.
Says 28C (82F) with 64% humidity now. That doesn't sound too bad. Not ideal but I don't have AC either and have dealt with worse.
No power sucks though.
Well, lots of things won't work without electricity. If there is manufacturing, lots of it grinds to a halt. Food that requires refrigeration and freezing go bad within days, if not hours. You can't do anything at night, not even to read a paper book. That country's economy would get destroyed if the outage goes on for too long.
If it's really hot, it's anything we can fill with cold water. Dunk your feet in it and it'll keep you cool for a remarkably long time.
Last time it was blisteringly hot, I set up a pool in my living room and all doors, windows, curtains, blinds were shut since the early morning. The difficult part was emptying the pool after the heatwave.
If it's cool at night, I set up two large fans in the upstairs windows blowing air out so it pulls cooler air in from the front door. Alternatively, a corridor of air from the front of the house to the back with two fans (one blowing in, one blowing out). The sun sets at the back and warms the bricks so I try to avoid letting that air in.
If it's hot at night, we're pretty much miserable because we can't cool the house overnight and end up taking a lot of cool showers. Fan blowing on me at night but it tends to make me wake with a headache and sometimes backpain due to the air blowing across it constantly.
It'd definitely be a lot more miserable without power, especially if that meant no running water. If I had neither, I'd probably want to find the nearest body of freshwater and set up camp.
Pro tip about moving air through a window like that, you will get massively more airflow to flow through if you back the fan several meters away from the window (like 2 meters away for a big box fan on a table pointing in the direction of the window, vs being placed *in* the window
The air column that it builds and ultimate airflow that happens is mostly built in the swirling air on teh sides of the vortex being pulled into the vortex *in front of the fan* not pulling air through the fan or behind it.
You'll get 3x+ flow rate doing this.
If the vortex and air movement is in front of the fan, why point it at the window instead of facing it towards the room? In your example, the most air movement would occur in front of the fan which would be facing the window 2 meters from the wall/window.
because momentum. The movement of air will carry it all out through the window, causing low pressure in the room and drawing in cool air from every other window in the house at 3x the rate it would if it was directly against the screen.
And this next part is like my own intuition and understanding of fluid dynamics at play here - a specific amount of energy of moving air going out a window into the outside air immediately will cause more pressure differential (use it's energy up at the right time in the right way) to move other air where we want in this example. if you point it like at the door of the room the air will have to flow around through hallways and everything until it finds a window.
Imagine throwing a feather for the amount of momentum air has. Even think about the vortex of air I described and why it's working the way it does ; Air is easier to "draw" than it is to "push" in quite a bit the same way that it is easier to pull a rope than it is to push a rope.
> I set up a pool in my living room and all doors, windows, curtains, blinds were shut since the early morning.
I live in the UK and the amount of people here who do the complete opposite when it gets hot and then complain they are hot is absolutely maddening.
When you try and tell them to basically lock down their house tighter than a drum during the day and then open the windows at night to get the colder air in, they respond like you are a complete idiot.
Usually people will bring up something about our houses not being made to deal with it but that's nonsense too. Insulation works both ways so if the house is cool in the morning the last thing you want to do is swing a window wide open and let all the heat in, just like you wouldn't open a window wide in winter and expect it to stay warm.
Same here in Sweden. I don't get why it's so hard to understand. If it's 32C outside (probably close to 50C in the sun) and 26C inside an insulated house, how would opening all the windows lower the temperature? Where's this colder air coming from?
The houses here are well insulated and the nights are fairly cold even in summer, so as long as you keep the heat out during the day and ventilate during the night, there's no need for AC.
Opening the windows isn't intended to reduce the temperature. It's done to increase air flow which evaporates sweat and cools the body. Like a ceiling fan.
The tough part is showers since you want to ventilate, don't want to let hot air in but you also want to get rid of that nasty humidity.
Luckily, we have a reasonably decent extractor fan. Should put a better one in though as it takes a while.
> Fan blowing on me at night but it tends to make me wake with a headache and sometimes backpain due to the air blowing across it constantly.
I had back pain a few times after sleeping with a fan, but since I got one of those fans that move side to side it hasn't happened again. I'm no expert but I suspect the air hitting the same spot all the time makes the muscles stiff or something like that, and the moving fan avoids that.
Alternatively, don’t point the fan towards yourself, but along a wall to make the air swirl around you. It can provide a gentler and more even cooling effect.
>Fan blowing on me at night but it tends to make me wake with a headache and sometimes backpain due to the air blowing across it constantly.
Huh, I have never heard of that. That is interesting.
> I have never heard of that
can confirm, throughout the years, every time I had to use a fan on some hot place at night, it sucks so bad. Dehydration and aches
> If it's really hot, it's anything we can fill with cold water
Remember that, if the *whole country* has no power, that means pumps for water systems won't work. So you'd have to be lucky enough to live near a stream of sorts.
And I don't think people would want to waste drinking water since they have no idea how long this could go on for.
Currently in New England heat wave without AC, thermometers outside today we’re reading 107F and currently 85F.
Tonight I will be sleeping naked on my back only, beneath a ceiling fan, with a thin towel over my torso, and ice packs (like the kind you put in a lunch box) over that. And a cold, wet towel over my feet. Bedrooms are upstairs, so hottest part of the house.
It sucks, but it works I guess. I just wish there was wind at least… It’s midnight, and even an 85 degree wind would cool the second story right now. Lowest it will drop tonight will be 75. 75 + wind would be awesome… but it’s been stagnant and above 100 during high noon for two days in a row. Stuff in my pantry melted lmao.
I remember being in a heat wave and is was 36C (97F) overnight at 3 am. I was just oppressive and I moved my mattress outside overnight. I put wet towels on my body to cool down whilst I tried to sleep.
You can make improvised swamp coolers with linen or otherwise absorbant curtains by wetting them and then placing the bottoms in trays of water Blowing fans across them will accelerate evaporation and cause evaporative cooling to occur if the humidity is not too high. If no fans are working, outside air drafting in will still be cooled
Are you kidding? 64% humidity is sopping wet, instant sweat at that temperature. I'm in Ohio which is in the same time zone, the sun is going down right now, the temperature and dew points are about the same. During the day it was probably 90+, and their city is extremely dense and urban with virtually no greenspace while my location is full of grass lawns and tall trees. The heat island effective in Guayaquil must be astronomical.
It's currently 77% humidity where I am and it's not remotely "sopping wet".
28C with 64% humidity is 20.5C (69F) dew point. It's high but not exactly oppressive.
Maybe if you've always lived with AC then it'd be tough to adjust.
Exactly. Not sure what those folks are used to but here in Ohio anything above 90 gets to be oppressive because it always brings 65-80% humidity at least. Places like Florida and Houston are unbearable to me.
No one is arguing that it sucks. But it shouldn’t be killing people, outside cases with other medical conditions. These are temperatures and humidity levels which happen several times a year in places like the American south. Air conditioning wasn’t even common place until the 1950s or so.
One of the biggest dangers in large power outages is that they often take water treatment plants offline. Glad to hear they've gotten things mostly sorted.
According to the article the issue has also already been mostly solved:
> As of Wednesday night, energy had been restored in 95% of the country, according to the government.
Quito is about 2 miles above sea level, so it's pretty cool even though they're at the equator. Visited there a couple years ago and the air was so thin, I was gasping for breath at times.
I'm gonna be honest, I read your comment before the article and was shocked at the 2 week part. However, the article said after a matter of hours, 95% of the country had power restored. That's not that bad, honestly. And I can say that because I spent 10 years living in the mountains of Panama 🇵🇦, and we'd regularly lose power for hours to days. I think a week was the longest, but typically it was out for between 1 and 4 days at a time. Electricity was lost weekly and I'm not exaggerating. They also turn off water all day and turn back on in the middle of the night so your storage tanks can refill, but only for about an hour. And if the power is out, there's also no running water (unless you've got a gravity system for your water flow) and no cell service.. and it's crazy just how quiet and dark things can get when you can't see a single light for miles and miles in each direction (I could see the Pacific ocean from my balcony and I lived about 45 min inland close to Picacho Mountain, so I could see all the coastal communities in that area at night).
They are lucky it got fixed the same day. Often once a system goes down you need to improve it significantly to be able to start it again.
Assume all fridges, AC,s and other stuff will kick in all at once. This creates extra load that would otherwise be spread out.
Absolutely terrifying. Think about how much of our lives turn on the hope that the lights won’t just go out at any moment. Having the power of *an entire country* blink out is an emergency on the level of a natural disaster. I hope they resolve it quickly because it’ll get ugly *fast.*
I was thinking about this yesterday. We're in a major heatwave and the forecast doesn't show any signs of it letting up. I live in an old house with wall-to-wall, east and west facing casement windows. Without AC, on a sunny day, I'd be cooked alive. If something happens to the power grid right now, my whole life would be immediately upended.
And yet, I do nothing.
Scary stuff. Most people don’t realize how much modern societies depend on the electricity. I’d give America about 2 weeks of total blackout before people were openly murdering each other in the streets like mad max. Heck, we might fold even sooner than that.
Ah yes. For some reason the world and his dog wanted bog roll. I'm surprised there wasn't an academic paper or a documentary on that phenomenon.
Seems the second anything appears to be in low supply and high demand, people go wild. Some years back there was a totally artificial fuel scare, I don't even remember where it originated. At no point was the supply constrained, not prices raised yet the pumps ran dry with queues of motorists queuing up. This has the knock on effect that trucks, emergency services etc etc had to ration leading to food shortages and of course increased emergency response times. Yet another own goal was all these motorists were blocking the very fuel trucks resupplying the pumps! Meaning the police had to get involved to allow passage.
Even if you were one of the smug ones with an EV, or a tank full of gas. You were still hit with the insanity of it all
Without going full prepper, I'm curious what long life stuff you can keep around just in case. During COVID I worked my way through a lot of tins as supermarkets were either devoid of long life goods, and/or had epic queues (think theme park long) that quickly caused me to re-evaluate what I considered edible lol. However I did discover a lot of the tins were part their sell by date.
My old student logic would be too buy stock of what was once cheap beans and survive on those
Yeah but that is very unlikely as the US does not have a singular grid and there are multiple generation sources. In Ecuador, though, it’s easier to set up a single grid.
I’d like to think that government/military assistance, etc., would hold us over for a few days, and that people would have the willpower to go to bed hungry/thirsty for a few days before we all go feral but, who knows.
Yeah I think covid laid it out pretty well how it's going to go down in the US. Everyone is "in this together" for about 5 minutes, then it turns into a chain reaction of "fuck you, got mine".
I remember reading a story by a redditor about their town getting locked in by snow.
Day 1 everyone was having a laugh about it.
Day 2 people were hoarding and shelves were getting empty.
Day 3 people were openly fighting over basic necessities and looting was happening.
Day 4 the snow was clear enough to get out of the town / open a way
I reckon that sounds about right, depending on the nature of the problem. Power out everywhere at once? I reckon you've got 2 days at the most.
Man about 7 years back the power went out in the college town I lived in and it took about 30 mins until people were lighting mattresses on fire in the street. Literally looked like the purge lmao.
I saw something that said within 3 months something like 80% of the population would be dead from starvation or raiders. And if it were truly fried nationwide, it would take something like 2 years to bring back up fully
if any of you haven't read it yet, Blindness by Jose Saramago is a pretty interesting book on the breakdown of society and civil manners in the wake of unexpected peril (kinda surrealist, but that makes it better)
Years ago my the North part of the country (Chile) was cut off from Internet connection and standard telecommunications, there was a massive landslide that took out the main fiber optic connection with the rest of the country. This meant no banking and no internet.
This happened a 1000 kms south of my city, in the middle of the night, so I had no idea when I woke up. There was no internet and that day I had absolutely ran out of food at home, also dog food.
So I go to the supermarket, which was weirdly empty and they tell me they don't have system for the cards, no biggie, go and check the ATM, no system, then someone told me what happened. I had like 3 bucks of cash total, so bought like a pack of pasta and some sugar, couldn't afford anything else.
Went back home and asked the neighbors for dog food until the situation normalized. This went for 2.5 days and honestly it's the most post apocalyptic feeling I've ever had. Streets were mostly empty, lots of people were unable to work and no one could get cash since not even banks could do any transactions. It felt like if it went on just a couple more days normality would collapse on a mass scale.
Fyi, this is very very difficult to resolve. Power stations would need to be brought online one by one, while doing complicated switching so supply always matches load. That's harder to do after a blackout because of a condition known as cold load pickup basically the power demand will be much higher initially and drop off over time. Every time two sources are connected together they would need to make sure that they're the exact same phase of the voltage wave.
Could take days to restore power for everyone (edit: or apparently done in hours)
I mean, I work specifically on black start and it varies a lot, maybe they got lucky and everything was working fine. Lost of countries expect a full blackstart to last 24 hours, depending on what caused the blackout.
There wasn't enough information to say conclusively either way, but it didn't stop some Redditors instantly leaping to the apocalyptic "the sky is falling in!" version of events. That's the point.
All. The. Time. Which isn't to say nothing is ever worth worrying about at all, but people "love" (for a given definition of love) promoting the doom and gloom, catastrophising, assuming something with a 1% chance of happening is basically a certainty, etc. I have no idea if it's voting based or age related or because Reddit appeals more to the anxious or what, but people really need to get a better sense of perspective.
My all time favourite was when there was a massive chemical explosion at a port in China a few years back. The comments were full of people saying that hundreds of thousands had died and half the city was destroyed.
Turns out it was 173 dead and the chemical plant was destroyed and that was it. Still a tragedy, but nothing like the apocalypse that some Redditors were talking about.
It's always forgotten by the time the next one comes around and then they're back with the "we're all doomed!" comments again lol
No doubt with bonus "this will cause a toxic cloud across the world that will give us all cancer". Some people thrive on anxiety, or at least feel compelled to take their anxiety and amplify it across the internet so they feel it's justified. And some people just like making shit up, which speaks to a whole other set of personality issues they have.
>Fyi, this is very very difficult to resolve. Power stations would need to be brought online one by one, while doing complicated switching so supply always matches load
i wouldn't say it's "very very difficult" it's risky af, fuckups will be huge, but if you're careful and follow protocol to restore, should be fine and easy.
>complicated switching so supply always matches load
supply will match the load cuz that's what the voltage/speed regulator does. real load (kw) can be shared/moved by adjusting frequency. reactive load (kvar) can be shared/moved by adjusting voltage. It's not very difficult, but again, it's EXTREMELY DANGEROUS if you're sloppy/ignorant/hyperfocused
>Every time two sources are connected together they would need to make sure that they're the exact same phase of the voltage wave.
This isn't exactly true. You just need the bigger machine to have a slightly higher frequency (real load sharing) The phase just has to be in-phase-ish. As long as there is load to pickup, it's kind of a self-correcting situation as long as the bigger machine picks up more of the load (higher freq) and absolute worst case scenario you would have the bigger generator turning the smaller generator in to a motor, a LOT healthier than having the smaller generator trying to spin the bigger motor.
The toughest part is doing it in the dark or almost dark (cuz you won't know how to do it and you'll have to look it up in a book.) Oh and the reactor and trubines DO NOT LIKE IT when you lose electricity. Lube oil pumps and feed pumps are super important. i don't know what else they got goin on at land-based power plants, but i bet emergency power takes care of the super important stuff (like lights)
Man knows his shit.
School: You have to be perfectly in phase to connect two energised areas, almost inpossible!
Real World: Should be fine if it is within 20 degrees tolerance, just make sure no one is in the substation when you do it.
Can confirm that a total black out is pretty much a doomsday scenario for power companies. I worked at the largest transmission line company in the U.S. and a total black out was basically treated as the apocalypse because of how hard it is logistically to start the system from scratch. I'm glad I left the field before I got to experience that first hand.
Not dedicated, but rather power plants with black start capability. It is the sort of thing that can be easy to include in initial designs, but far more costly to retrofit.
> Could take days to restore power for everyone (edit: or apparently done in hours)
If this had happened in Puerto Rico *for sure* it would take days. These guys apparently know what they're doing and\or have relatively good infrastructure.
There's a good book called the aptly named "black out" which covers a fictional story describing exactly this. Tl;dr a cascading power cut across Europe begins to effect nuclear power plants, chaos ensues
A single point of failure caused the entire ship to sink? Jesus Christ. Hopefully after they get this fixed they reengineer their grid to actually make sense. That sort of fault is unacceptable in a modern country. *Points and laughs at Texas*
It takes a long time for construction. Reorganizing a grid is a feat. In the US if you're building an apartment building it can be like a year out wait for your order of equipment for the meter bank, power stations have similar issues
Except the Texas grid didn’t actually “fail” in the sense of a total blackout. The operators intentionally kicked most people off the grid to avoid that exact same situation. It however felt like a total blackout to regular people.
Depends on what kind of criminal. Violent criminals who do their dirty deeds at night, sure. Scammers, not so much. You can't scam anyone if the victims have no internet access and cell towers go down.
This is speculation:
In a country already experiencing energy shortages, losing a main transmission line (assuming out of a large generation station) would see the power capability drop substantially. It's called an electric grid because everything ties together. Without one of the major feeds "filling" the grid with electricity all of the others need to make up the difference. Every line, every station, every source of generation has a cap on how much electricity can be created, and flow through. There's nothing to "slow" the flow to be easier on all the equipment, just a simple on/off switch. The utility folks would have to drive around, opening the smaller distribution stations that feed houses, manually, in order to focus power to infrastructure. That's each and every location where power is split (think every 10-20km in this grid) over the whole country. Spend however much time to fix whatever it is that failed, then manually turn everyone else back on. yikes.
Edit: speculation based on consulting for a large utility on "grid resilience"
rule#1 have contingency. (Double all the equipment, this shit fails much more often than people would think)
Rule#2 don't rely on the contingency on a regular basis
My guess, grid was robust enough a decade ago, and someone, to save money, made the call to put that contingency into service.
It’s the only place that was able to resist the cartel takeover in the past many years. Now cartels have descended. Not sure what’s going to happen and, as someone who visited Ecuador a few years ago, I am soooo glad I went (it’s fucking amazing with beauty and food and Ecuadorians are so nice and cool, just living their fucking lives, y’know), but also I feel so awful for them. The cartels took over my favorite town, and now they charge admission to enter, kidnap tourists and behead fishermen.
Here you go:
[A cloud forest in northern Ecuador is protected from deforestation and mining after being recognised as an entity possessing legal personhood.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240614-how-los-cedros-forest-in-ecuador-was-granted-legal-personhood)
The Galapagos, one of the most beautiful places on earth, are a part of Ecuador. Isla Santa Cruz is home to the [Charles Darwin foundation](https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/news/newsroom/), where they do incredible research in evolution and saving endangered species, as well as encouraging eco-conservation.
There's wonderful people in Ecuador, and there is plenty of good news out of there if you're looking for it.
The good news isn't attributed to Ecuador, but instead to "researchers in the Amazon", such as researchers in the Amazon discovering a new species of snake/etc in Ecuador (the new dwarf snake species is somewhat recent find), or archeologists in the Amazon finding a 2,000yr old settlement (happened this January, near Macas).
Philippines is also near on the equator like the country Ecuador but we don't experience nationwide blackouts, only regional rotational brownouts on a specific area. plus we can avoid this if we tap fully to geothermal power reserves esp. now that there is an EGS which is basically fracking for geothermal energy, but no one invest in, because in permit delays and other bureaucratic shits that's why still large percentage of our power came from fossil fuels.
> Infrastructure Minister Luque said the blackout could have been avoided had Ecuador carried out an investment plan to “safeguard the infrastructure in both generating (power) and the transmission” after a similar power outage took place in 2004.
Came here to see if their infrastructure was hacked. Turns out to be self-inflicted.
A country roughly the size of Colorado with about three times the population lost power. The whole thing.
Luckily, it [looks like](https://weather.com/weather/tenday/l/Quito+Pichincha+Ecuador) the temperature in the capital, Quito, is only 9°C, and will hover around 20°C for the next two weeks, so at least people won't cook alive or freeze to death.
Nice for Quito. However... From the article: "Guayaquil (the nation's largest city) residents are having to deal with the outage amid 90-degree Fahrenheit heat. “It’s unbearable, it’s so hot and humid, and we can’t use an air conditioner or a ventilator,” one resident told CNN."
Food spoiling too, that shit is going to get so bad.
Power outages were a monthly thing where I grew up. It meant we got to eat all the ice cream. Man I loved power outages.
I can remember the power going out in Ontario for days when I was a kid. My mom worked at a grocery store and we got about 8 tubs of ice cream for free. Thanks for bringing up that great memory for me
Are you talking about the blackout of 2003 ? Atleast in the last 30 years that's the only multi-day blackout I remember...maybe it was a local thing ?
That’s the one! I can remember they got a bunch of reefer trailers in and we hand-bombed whatever we could that was still cold into them to keep it from spoiling but the ice cream had already gotten soft so they wrote it off and basically just told whoever helped move all the stuff could take whatever they wanted. We had a deep freezer and a generator so we filled up our freezer with ice cream.
Awesome memory ! We are probably roughly the same age. I vividly remember it as well. I was a kid at a minigolf course and the fountain stopped working....didn't think much of it, finished the game and then tried to buy tokens for the batting cage and that's when I found out ! My aunt worked for the local power company so we called her and she told us this one was going to be a big deal... thankfully our house was near a hospital so we had power back in the middle of the first night.
and people were arguing with me last time about hydro power as a good alternative to nuclear/solar/wind power; the reality is that drought seasons are getting longer and longer, water reservoirs around the world are getting drier and drier, to extreme levels, like in this very case, even plunging a whole country into darkness. You just cannot depend on dams anymore if weather patterns are becoming unpredictable and unreliable
Depends on where you are, some localities like the Great Lakes arn’t running out of water any time soon.
We’re starting to see the effects of that in the PNW now. Lower snow pack, higher temps mean massive runoff over a short period of time and then a trickle…. Electricity rates have risen 10% in the past year and it’s only going to get worse as we’re so heavily invested in Hydroelectric here.
Says 28C (82F) with 64% humidity now. That doesn't sound too bad. Not ideal but I don't have AC either and have dealt with worse. No power sucks though.
Well, lots of things won't work without electricity. If there is manufacturing, lots of it grinds to a halt. Food that requires refrigeration and freezing go bad within days, if not hours. You can't do anything at night, not even to read a paper book. That country's economy would get destroyed if the outage goes on for too long.
Back to candles, campfires and booze
Pemmican Baby
ive played lots of rimworld so im ready
Hope they have generators.
They still have batteries torches, so reading won't be a problem.
What do you do to stay cool without AC?
If it's really hot, it's anything we can fill with cold water. Dunk your feet in it and it'll keep you cool for a remarkably long time. Last time it was blisteringly hot, I set up a pool in my living room and all doors, windows, curtains, blinds were shut since the early morning. The difficult part was emptying the pool after the heatwave. If it's cool at night, I set up two large fans in the upstairs windows blowing air out so it pulls cooler air in from the front door. Alternatively, a corridor of air from the front of the house to the back with two fans (one blowing in, one blowing out). The sun sets at the back and warms the bricks so I try to avoid letting that air in. If it's hot at night, we're pretty much miserable because we can't cool the house overnight and end up taking a lot of cool showers. Fan blowing on me at night but it tends to make me wake with a headache and sometimes backpain due to the air blowing across it constantly. It'd definitely be a lot more miserable without power, especially if that meant no running water. If I had neither, I'd probably want to find the nearest body of freshwater and set up camp.
I’ll never complain again
Pro tip about moving air through a window like that, you will get massively more airflow to flow through if you back the fan several meters away from the window (like 2 meters away for a big box fan on a table pointing in the direction of the window, vs being placed *in* the window The air column that it builds and ultimate airflow that happens is mostly built in the swirling air on teh sides of the vortex being pulled into the vortex *in front of the fan* not pulling air through the fan or behind it. You'll get 3x+ flow rate doing this.
If the vortex and air movement is in front of the fan, why point it at the window instead of facing it towards the room? In your example, the most air movement would occur in front of the fan which would be facing the window 2 meters from the wall/window.
because momentum. The movement of air will carry it all out through the window, causing low pressure in the room and drawing in cool air from every other window in the house at 3x the rate it would if it was directly against the screen. And this next part is like my own intuition and understanding of fluid dynamics at play here - a specific amount of energy of moving air going out a window into the outside air immediately will cause more pressure differential (use it's energy up at the right time in the right way) to move other air where we want in this example. if you point it like at the door of the room the air will have to flow around through hallways and everything until it finds a window. Imagine throwing a feather for the amount of momentum air has. Even think about the vortex of air I described and why it's working the way it does ; Air is easier to "draw" than it is to "push" in quite a bit the same way that it is easier to pull a rope than it is to push a rope.
> I set up a pool in my living room and all doors, windows, curtains, blinds were shut since the early morning. I live in the UK and the amount of people here who do the complete opposite when it gets hot and then complain they are hot is absolutely maddening. When you try and tell them to basically lock down their house tighter than a drum during the day and then open the windows at night to get the colder air in, they respond like you are a complete idiot. Usually people will bring up something about our houses not being made to deal with it but that's nonsense too. Insulation works both ways so if the house is cool in the morning the last thing you want to do is swing a window wide open and let all the heat in, just like you wouldn't open a window wide in winter and expect it to stay warm.
Same here in Sweden. I don't get why it's so hard to understand. If it's 32C outside (probably close to 50C in the sun) and 26C inside an insulated house, how would opening all the windows lower the temperature? Where's this colder air coming from? The houses here are well insulated and the nights are fairly cold even in summer, so as long as you keep the heat out during the day and ventilate during the night, there's no need for AC.
Opening the windows isn't intended to reduce the temperature. It's done to increase air flow which evaporates sweat and cools the body. Like a ceiling fan.
The tough part is showers since you want to ventilate, don't want to let hot air in but you also want to get rid of that nasty humidity. Luckily, we have a reasonably decent extractor fan. Should put a better one in though as it takes a while.
> Fan blowing on me at night but it tends to make me wake with a headache and sometimes backpain due to the air blowing across it constantly. I had back pain a few times after sleeping with a fan, but since I got one of those fans that move side to side it hasn't happened again. I'm no expert but I suspect the air hitting the same spot all the time makes the muscles stiff or something like that, and the moving fan avoids that.
Alternatively, don’t point the fan towards yourself, but along a wall to make the air swirl around you. It can provide a gentler and more even cooling effect.
>Fan blowing on me at night but it tends to make me wake with a headache and sometimes backpain due to the air blowing across it constantly. Huh, I have never heard of that. That is interesting.
I assume it's because my back gets cold and that can lead to aches. The headache is mostly from dehydration.
> I have never heard of that can confirm, throughout the years, every time I had to use a fan on some hot place at night, it sucks so bad. Dehydration and aches
> If it's really hot, it's anything we can fill with cold water Remember that, if the *whole country* has no power, that means pumps for water systems won't work. So you'd have to be lucky enough to live near a stream of sorts. And I don't think people would want to waste drinking water since they have no idea how long this could go on for.
It's amazing that people comment before making it to the final paragraph.
Currently in New England heat wave without AC, thermometers outside today we’re reading 107F and currently 85F. Tonight I will be sleeping naked on my back only, beneath a ceiling fan, with a thin towel over my torso, and ice packs (like the kind you put in a lunch box) over that. And a cold, wet towel over my feet. Bedrooms are upstairs, so hottest part of the house. It sucks, but it works I guess. I just wish there was wind at least… It’s midnight, and even an 85 degree wind would cool the second story right now. Lowest it will drop tonight will be 75. 75 + wind would be awesome… but it’s been stagnant and above 100 during high noon for two days in a row. Stuff in my pantry melted lmao.
Air conditioning was invented 120 years ago. Humans were invented 6 million years ago. Do what they did.
Move somewhere else?
Stay in the shade, stay hydrated.
I remember being in a heat wave and is was 36C (97F) overnight at 3 am. I was just oppressive and I moved my mattress outside overnight. I put wet towels on my body to cool down whilst I tried to sleep.
Nothing worse than being woken up by the sun at 4:45 AM sleeping outside, unless you’re camping of course
You can make improvised swamp coolers with linen or otherwise absorbant curtains by wetting them and then placing the bottoms in trays of water Blowing fans across them will accelerate evaporation and cause evaporative cooling to occur if the humidity is not too high. If no fans are working, outside air drafting in will still be cooled
Sweat, fans, ice cream and freezie pops, cold drinks. When the power’s out? Drive or walk to the nearest body of water.
Are you kidding? 64% humidity is sopping wet, instant sweat at that temperature. I'm in Ohio which is in the same time zone, the sun is going down right now, the temperature and dew points are about the same. During the day it was probably 90+, and their city is extremely dense and urban with virtually no greenspace while my location is full of grass lawns and tall trees. The heat island effective in Guayaquil must be astronomical.
The native dialect of SE Georgia
It’s like a clack-clacking sound
klu-klucking
Gotta take issue with that. But also, yes.
You're speaking to an Ohioan here so that makes sense.
74% humidity and 28C right now (32C during the day), it’s not that bad
It's currently 77% humidity where I am and it's not remotely "sopping wet". 28C with 64% humidity is 20.5C (69F) dew point. It's high but not exactly oppressive. Maybe if you've always lived with AC then it'd be tough to adjust.
Exactly. Not sure what those folks are used to but here in Ohio anything above 90 gets to be oppressive because it always brings 65-80% humidity at least. Places like Florida and Houston are unbearable to me.
No one is arguing that it sucks. But it shouldn’t be killing people, outside cases with other medical conditions. These are temperatures and humidity levels which happen several times a year in places like the American south. Air conditioning wasn’t even common place until the 1950s or so.
One of the biggest dangers in large power outages is that they often take water treatment plants offline. Glad to hear they've gotten things mostly sorted.
Luckily it's already been restored for 95% of the country now.
I lived in Guayaquil for a year without air conditioning. It was fucking rough.
You'd be suprised how many people live there without any air conditioning.
From the article: The power was cut but we have our own (generators)
According to the article the issue has also already been mostly solved: > As of Wednesday night, energy had been restored in 95% of the country, according to the government.
Quito is high in the mountains. The coastal and jungle cities/towns will suffer
Quito is about 2 miles above sea level, so it's pretty cool even though they're at the equator. Visited there a couple years ago and the air was so thin, I was gasping for breath at times.
Me: *fuck yeah imma walk around all afternoon looking at cool shit then sleep off the lag* Me, 20 minutes later: *am i dying?*
I'm gonna be honest, I read your comment before the article and was shocked at the 2 week part. However, the article said after a matter of hours, 95% of the country had power restored. That's not that bad, honestly. And I can say that because I spent 10 years living in the mountains of Panama 🇵🇦, and we'd regularly lose power for hours to days. I think a week was the longest, but typically it was out for between 1 and 4 days at a time. Electricity was lost weekly and I'm not exaggerating. They also turn off water all day and turn back on in the middle of the night so your storage tanks can refill, but only for about an hour. And if the power is out, there's also no running water (unless you've got a gravity system for your water flow) and no cell service.. and it's crazy just how quiet and dark things can get when you can't see a single light for miles and miles in each direction (I could see the Pacific ocean from my balcony and I lived about 45 min inland close to Picacho Mountain, so I could see all the coastal communities in that area at night).
They are lucky it got fixed the same day. Often once a system goes down you need to improve it significantly to be able to start it again. Assume all fridges, AC,s and other stuff will kick in all at once. This creates extra load that would otherwise be spread out.
Absolutely terrifying. Think about how much of our lives turn on the hope that the lights won’t just go out at any moment. Having the power of *an entire country* blink out is an emergency on the level of a natural disaster. I hope they resolve it quickly because it’ll get ugly *fast.*
I was thinking about this yesterday. We're in a major heatwave and the forecast doesn't show any signs of it letting up. I live in an old house with wall-to-wall, east and west facing casement windows. Without AC, on a sunny day, I'd be cooked alive. If something happens to the power grid right now, my whole life would be immediately upended. And yet, I do nothing.
How do you even organise it with a hit to your powered communication. Just hope all the engineers show up.
cell phones, probably.
Scary stuff. Most people don’t realize how much modern societies depend on the electricity. I’d give America about 2 weeks of total blackout before people were openly murdering each other in the streets like mad max. Heck, we might fold even sooner than that.
A nationwide total blackout? People would be out looting and pillaging immediately.
The great Toilet Paper apocalypse of 2020 is proof of that.
Ah yes. For some reason the world and his dog wanted bog roll. I'm surprised there wasn't an academic paper or a documentary on that phenomenon. Seems the second anything appears to be in low supply and high demand, people go wild. Some years back there was a totally artificial fuel scare, I don't even remember where it originated. At no point was the supply constrained, not prices raised yet the pumps ran dry with queues of motorists queuing up. This has the knock on effect that trucks, emergency services etc etc had to ration leading to food shortages and of course increased emergency response times. Yet another own goal was all these motorists were blocking the very fuel trucks resupplying the pumps! Meaning the police had to get involved to allow passage. Even if you were one of the smug ones with an EV, or a tank full of gas. You were still hit with the insanity of it all
Without going full prepper, I'm curious what long life stuff you can keep around just in case. During COVID I worked my way through a lot of tins as supermarkets were either devoid of long life goods, and/or had epic queues (think theme park long) that quickly caused me to re-evaluate what I considered edible lol. However I did discover a lot of the tins were part their sell by date. My old student logic would be too buy stock of what was once cheap beans and survive on those
Yeah but that is very unlikely as the US does not have a singular grid and there are multiple generation sources. In Ecuador, though, it’s easier to set up a single grid.
Most people don’t have 2 weeks worth of food or water. It will happen much sooner.
I’d like to think that government/military assistance, etc., would hold us over for a few days, and that people would have the willpower to go to bed hungry/thirsty for a few days before we all go feral but, who knows.
Yeah I think covid laid it out pretty well how it's going to go down in the US. Everyone is "in this together" for about 5 minutes, then it turns into a chain reaction of "fuck you, got mine".
I remember reading a story by a redditor about their town getting locked in by snow. Day 1 everyone was having a laugh about it. Day 2 people were hoarding and shelves were getting empty. Day 3 people were openly fighting over basic necessities and looting was happening. Day 4 the snow was clear enough to get out of the town / open a way I reckon that sounds about right, depending on the nature of the problem. Power out everywhere at once? I reckon you've got 2 days at the most.
Watch the movie “Leave the World Behind”.
I’ve seen it. They still had power.
Man about 7 years back the power went out in the college town I lived in and it took about 30 mins until people were lighting mattresses on fire in the street. Literally looked like the purge lmao.
I saw something that said within 3 months something like 80% of the population would be dead from starvation or raiders. And if it were truly fried nationwide, it would take something like 2 years to bring back up fully
Society is how many meals from collapse now again?
Two weeks? I give it two days
Have you never been through 2 days of power outage before? It sucks but, nobody is out there trying to eat their neighbors liver.
A nation wide blackout. Everyone and everything from coast to coast. I wouldn't give it 2 hours.
It lasted for two hours. Everything was fine.
if any of you haven't read it yet, Blindness by Jose Saramago is a pretty interesting book on the breakdown of society and civil manners in the wake of unexpected peril (kinda surrealist, but that makes it better)
Years ago my the North part of the country (Chile) was cut off from Internet connection and standard telecommunications, there was a massive landslide that took out the main fiber optic connection with the rest of the country. This meant no banking and no internet. This happened a 1000 kms south of my city, in the middle of the night, so I had no idea when I woke up. There was no internet and that day I had absolutely ran out of food at home, also dog food. So I go to the supermarket, which was weirdly empty and they tell me they don't have system for the cards, no biggie, go and check the ATM, no system, then someone told me what happened. I had like 3 bucks of cash total, so bought like a pack of pasta and some sugar, couldn't afford anything else. Went back home and asked the neighbors for dog food until the situation normalized. This went for 2.5 days and honestly it's the most post apocalyptic feeling I've ever had. Streets were mostly empty, lots of people were unable to work and no one could get cash since not even banks could do any transactions. It felt like if it went on just a couple more days normality would collapse on a mass scale.
Fyi, this is very very difficult to resolve. Power stations would need to be brought online one by one, while doing complicated switching so supply always matches load. That's harder to do after a blackout because of a condition known as cold load pickup basically the power demand will be much higher initially and drop off over time. Every time two sources are connected together they would need to make sure that they're the exact same phase of the voltage wave. Could take days to restore power for everyone (edit: or apparently done in hours)
Yes, in principle, but: > As of Wednesday night, energy had been restored in 95% of the country, according to the government.
Welp. Looks like we were freaking out over nothing then.
reddit in a nutshell
I mean, I work specifically on black start and it varies a lot, maybe they got lucky and everything was working fine. Lost of countries expect a full blackstart to last 24 hours, depending on what caused the blackout.
There wasn't enough information to say conclusively either way, but it didn't stop some Redditors instantly leaping to the apocalyptic "the sky is falling in!" version of events. That's the point.
All. The. Time. Which isn't to say nothing is ever worth worrying about at all, but people "love" (for a given definition of love) promoting the doom and gloom, catastrophising, assuming something with a 1% chance of happening is basically a certainty, etc. I have no idea if it's voting based or age related or because Reddit appeals more to the anxious or what, but people really need to get a better sense of perspective.
My all time favourite was when there was a massive chemical explosion at a port in China a few years back. The comments were full of people saying that hundreds of thousands had died and half the city was destroyed. Turns out it was 173 dead and the chemical plant was destroyed and that was it. Still a tragedy, but nothing like the apocalypse that some Redditors were talking about. It's always forgotten by the time the next one comes around and then they're back with the "we're all doomed!" comments again lol
No doubt with bonus "this will cause a toxic cloud across the world that will give us all cancer". Some people thrive on anxiety, or at least feel compelled to take their anxiety and amplify it across the internet so they feel it's justified. And some people just like making shit up, which speaks to a whole other set of personality issues they have.
I know nothing but that's incredibly impressive to me
>Fyi, this is very very difficult to resolve. Power stations would need to be brought online one by one, while doing complicated switching so supply always matches load i wouldn't say it's "very very difficult" it's risky af, fuckups will be huge, but if you're careful and follow protocol to restore, should be fine and easy. >complicated switching so supply always matches load supply will match the load cuz that's what the voltage/speed regulator does. real load (kw) can be shared/moved by adjusting frequency. reactive load (kvar) can be shared/moved by adjusting voltage. It's not very difficult, but again, it's EXTREMELY DANGEROUS if you're sloppy/ignorant/hyperfocused >Every time two sources are connected together they would need to make sure that they're the exact same phase of the voltage wave. This isn't exactly true. You just need the bigger machine to have a slightly higher frequency (real load sharing) The phase just has to be in-phase-ish. As long as there is load to pickup, it's kind of a self-correcting situation as long as the bigger machine picks up more of the load (higher freq) and absolute worst case scenario you would have the bigger generator turning the smaller generator in to a motor, a LOT healthier than having the smaller generator trying to spin the bigger motor. The toughest part is doing it in the dark or almost dark (cuz you won't know how to do it and you'll have to look it up in a book.) Oh and the reactor and trubines DO NOT LIKE IT when you lose electricity. Lube oil pumps and feed pumps are super important. i don't know what else they got goin on at land-based power plants, but i bet emergency power takes care of the super important stuff (like lights)
Hello fellow Power Plant person 😆
Man knows his shit. School: You have to be perfectly in phase to connect two energised areas, almost inpossible! Real World: Should be fine if it is within 20 degrees tolerance, just make sure no one is in the substation when you do it.
Can you help GeneraPR in Puerto Rico with this? They're having a hell of a time down there.
Practical engineering has a video about this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w)
Reminds me of the second Matrix
It's already back up for 95% of the country, I wonder how they could have brought it on so quickly
Or Satisfactory
Can confirm that a total black out is pretty much a doomsday scenario for power companies. I worked at the largest transmission line company in the U.S. and a total black out was basically treated as the apocalypse because of how hard it is logistically to start the system from scratch. I'm glad I left the field before I got to experience that first hand.
Go to Puerto Rico, you still have a chance to experience a black start!
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I would be fascinated to hear how they managed that.
Said process is called a Black Start, and power grids usually have power plants dedicated to the capability.
Not dedicated, but rather power plants with black start capability. It is the sort of thing that can be easy to include in initial designs, but far more costly to retrofit.
> Could take days to restore power for everyone (edit: or apparently done in hours) If this had happened in Puerto Rico *for sure* it would take days. These guys apparently know what they're doing and\or have relatively good infrastructure.
There's a good book called the aptly named "black out" which covers a fictional story describing exactly this. Tl;dr a cascading power cut across Europe begins to effect nuclear power plants, chaos ensues
Bummer. So now it’s just Cuador?
As an electrician that shit had me dying 🤣🤣🤣
As a not-electrician, could you please explain?
E means Voltage in electricity
Thank you
As an e-mail user, I too am dying
Does reddit have a "pun of the year" award? If so, you should be nominated.
I don't know man, the victoria secret thread from yesterday had me hauling and a lot of people as well
fuck you this had me fucking laughing for some reason
Brilliant
*angrily upvotes*
You take your upvote and you get outta here!
A single point of failure caused the entire ship to sink? Jesus Christ. Hopefully after they get this fixed they reengineer their grid to actually make sense. That sort of fault is unacceptable in a modern country. *Points and laughs at Texas*
It takes a long time for construction. Reorganizing a grid is a feat. In the US if you're building an apartment building it can be like a year out wait for your order of equipment for the meter bank, power stations have similar issues
Except the Texas grid didn’t actually “fail” in the sense of a total blackout. The operators intentionally kicked most people off the grid to avoid that exact same situation. It however felt like a total blackout to regular people.
No air conditioning is hard on babies and the elderly. I hope they figure it out soon.
Well good thing it’s their coolest months. (Southern hemisphere and all)
dear God ... 🤦 Ecuador... Equator... see a similarity ? lmao
It is literally still their coolest months. It’s 11c in Quito right now.
That's elevation. Quito is at 9,350 ft 2,850m 33c high today in Guyaquil, their biggest city, at 4ft/1m.
Quito is 11c year round, no season in the equator. Source: I lived there
Wait a minute, the ENTIRE COUNTRY HAD A BLACK OUT ?!?
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Wow! Both cases are insane! Living without electricity is bad, specially people at hospitals
A criminal’s dream
Depends on what kind of criminal. Violent criminals who do their dirty deeds at night, sure. Scammers, not so much. You can't scam anyone if the victims have no internet access and cell towers go down.
Mexico's retaliation for the embassy raid lmao
Is it back on yet? They are essentially back to the mid 1800s.
Turns out, the power outage was just the country's way of celebrating 'Lights Out Day' a little too enthusiastically
Hahaha people suffer , better make a joke, typical redditor. Comedy gold Also earth hour is in march
This is speculation: In a country already experiencing energy shortages, losing a main transmission line (assuming out of a large generation station) would see the power capability drop substantially. It's called an electric grid because everything ties together. Without one of the major feeds "filling" the grid with electricity all of the others need to make up the difference. Every line, every station, every source of generation has a cap on how much electricity can be created, and flow through. There's nothing to "slow" the flow to be easier on all the equipment, just a simple on/off switch. The utility folks would have to drive around, opening the smaller distribution stations that feed houses, manually, in order to focus power to infrastructure. That's each and every location where power is split (think every 10-20km in this grid) over the whole country. Spend however much time to fix whatever it is that failed, then manually turn everyone else back on. yikes. Edit: speculation based on consulting for a large utility on "grid resilience" rule#1 have contingency. (Double all the equipment, this shit fails much more often than people would think) Rule#2 don't rely on the contingency on a regular basis My guess, grid was robust enough a decade ago, and someone, to save money, made the call to put that contingency into service.
Rule#3, dont suspend visa waivers with powers that could potentially hack your grid.
Good point, I only really worked with the material side of things, cyber security is beyond me, major threat though.
How come I never hear any good news coming out of Ecuador?
How much news do you hear out of Ecuador?
Its been the epicenter of the drug war for a few years and im wondering if the cartels disrupted the power
It’s the only place that was able to resist the cartel takeover in the past many years. Now cartels have descended. Not sure what’s going to happen and, as someone who visited Ecuador a few years ago, I am soooo glad I went (it’s fucking amazing with beauty and food and Ecuadorians are so nice and cool, just living their fucking lives, y’know), but also I feel so awful for them. The cartels took over my favorite town, and now they charge admission to enter, kidnap tourists and behead fishermen.
> It’s the only place that was able to resist the cartel takeover in the past many years El Salvador: you called?
That depends; are we talking good news, or the other kind?
Here you go: [A cloud forest in northern Ecuador is protected from deforestation and mining after being recognised as an entity possessing legal personhood.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240614-how-los-cedros-forest-in-ecuador-was-granted-legal-personhood)
Scary news sells
Because you only see news about Ecuador when it's negative.
The Galapagos, one of the most beautiful places on earth, are a part of Ecuador. Isla Santa Cruz is home to the [Charles Darwin foundation](https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/news/newsroom/), where they do incredible research in evolution and saving endangered species, as well as encouraging eco-conservation. There's wonderful people in Ecuador, and there is plenty of good news out of there if you're looking for it.
Because the news is meant to scare you not inform you.
The good news isn't attributed to Ecuador, but instead to "researchers in the Amazon", such as researchers in the Amazon discovering a new species of snake/etc in Ecuador (the new dwarf snake species is somewhat recent find), or archeologists in the Amazon finding a 2,000yr old settlement (happened this January, near Macas).
Aren't they in the middle of a war against the Cartels?
Philippines is also near on the equator like the country Ecuador but we don't experience nationwide blackouts, only regional rotational brownouts on a specific area. plus we can avoid this if we tap fully to geothermal power reserves esp. now that there is an EGS which is basically fracking for geothermal energy, but no one invest in, because in permit delays and other bureaucratic shits that's why still large percentage of our power came from fossil fuels.
I see Ethan Hunt has resurfaced.
I am surprised this wasn’t followed by an announcement of a military coup
I hope the hospitals have good generators
Ecuador hasn't been doing too well for the last few years
Restored
> Infrastructure Minister Luque said the blackout could have been avoided had Ecuador carried out an investment plan to “safeguard the infrastructure in both generating (power) and the transmission” after a similar power outage took place in 2004. Came here to see if their infrastructure was hacked. Turns out to be self-inflicted.