Founder · Power outages and home heat
Twenty-two years on rural distribution lines in the Ozarks, nine of them interrupted by ice storms bad enough to darken six counties at once. Dan founded this site and writes everything on it about outages, generators, heat and the first four hours.
Background
What did the job actually involve?
Rebuilding distribution circuits after weather, mostly at night, mostly in weather that had not finished yet. Roughly six counties, all rural.
Rural distribution is a different problem from urban. The spans are long, the roads are bad, and the customer at the end of the line can be forty minutes from the nearest crew even when nothing is broken. That geography is the reason Dan’s guides assume nobody is coming for a while. It is not a worldview. It is a driving time.
The part that shaped this site was not the line work. It was the conversations at the meter after the lights came back, where the same five questions came up every single time, and the answers were always things a household could have settled months earlier for nothing.
What does he write here?
Outages, generators, home heat, refrigeration and the order of actions in the first twelve hours. Anything where sequence matters more than equipment.
He is also the person who insists on the numbers. If a guide on this site says four hours, it says it because a federal source says it, and the source is linked in the text rather than summarised.
From Dan, on the one thing he would change
I spent years telling people to buy a generator. I would take that back. Ninety percent of what a generator gets used for in a short outage is a refrigerator and a phone, and there are cheaper, quieter, far safer ways to do both. Buy the generator last, if at all, and learn carbon monoxide first.
- Based inGainesville, Missouri
- Years in the trade22 on rural distribution lines
- Ice storms worked9, including February 2021
- Writes aboutPower outages, generators, home heat, refrigeration
- Reachable at[email protected]
You do not get graded on the gear you own. You get graded on how fast the house agrees on a plan, and that part is free.
Dan Brackett
Where to find this work
Everything filed under Power Outages & Home Heat on this site is written or edited by Dan Brackett. The rest of the team, and how the three of us split the work, is on the page about who we are and how we test things.