Sandy's Impact on your Listening

We lost power here in Shelton CT from Monday until late Friday afternoon ... I was lucky enough to get a room at the Hampton Inn for 3 days and four nights so I could take hot showers and watch some TV in the interim

When the power came back on Friday evening I noticed all the street lights traffic lights and store signs were shinning much brighter apparently due to all the new transformers, cabling, and fresh connections

My stereo is off line until after the holidays but the colors on my plasma has a lot more pop and vividness

Then yesterday we were hit with the Northeaster ... got 8 inches of snow and my wife Gloria was staring through the kitchen window for over 4 hours straight ... finally I decided with conditions worsening ... I better let her back in the house (;-)

My brother in law had his basement flooded despite putting in a battery backup for his sump pump hours earlier (it did not have time to charge fully before the power went out). That was a bummer.

My sister in BErgen County NJ had a 75 foot tree fall and luckily just miss her house but take out her garage, fence, and son's car.

My work closed for two days unscheduled for the first time in my 16 years there. Ironically, I was able to carve out some of that time to listen to music instead of being at work. I felt a little guilty about that knowing what was going on for others elsewhere.

I read that East River NYC flooding came up to the door of the OHM Acoustics facility in Brooklyn, but they managed to come out undamaged. That might have affected my listening at some point down the road FWIW.

Decided that this is likely to be "the new normal" weather wise in the Northeast. I have ordered a 20Kw generator w/ a 200 amp transfer switch that runs on NG.

This will give us functionality during outages, but I may set it up to be the source of power to my listening room all the time.

Still no power for me after 10 days, it's getting pretty cold in the house. No real damage to the house, thankfully, and I am a lot luckier than those who have lost everything, so I'm not complaining. While I miss my system, fortunately there's plenty of live music to hear in the area, and I have found that listening to WQXR on my car radio (I have a 50 minute or so commute each way) has been more musically satisfying than usual.

Slipknot, I had priced out and was set to get an NG whole-house generator this past summer, but my wife said no because the only place we could put it might create too much noise for the neighbors. She has refrained from complaining about the cold as a result.

Hi Russ-
Sorry to hear that you guys are still out. Parts of our area got hit worse than others. Hope you get power back soon.

The Generac standby unit I am getting "claims" only 66db running at full tilt, or about what an A/C compressor running sounds like. I am planning on installing it next to my A/C unit, as that is where the NG line enters the house too. Downside is, that it is right outside the listening room.