We've lost power for a few minutes here and there but it's been due to the afternoon rain storms. Not due to over loads thank heaven. We're in central Fl.

We're on the Jersey Shore. We lost one transformer on the main thoroughfare here on Monday. Two or three blocks of businesses and homes were without power for about two hours. Tomorrow (Wednesday) will be the real test with a high of 100 degrees forecast for the afternoon.

We had it go out for about 3 hrs last night and 2 hrs this afternoon. Fingers are crossed for tonight. We're in Chicago and they say we're getting close to the end of this round of heat!!!!! Thank goodness! I have tons of gardening to do...

here power goes regularly with intervals and department called it as LOAD SHEDDING

We haven't lost power, but if we do we have our generator ready to go!

We feel very fortunate in that we have a backup system in our motorhome, it's totally self sufficient. The generator is an Onan Quiet Diesel, and it IS very quiet. Right now we have it parked in the backyard of the small house that we are building, but we've yet to experience a power failure here in San Antonio. We're connected to all utilities.

Never once during the heat wave. Fortunately for us, most of the worst days fell on a weekend, when most businesses were not drawing maximum power.

Strangely enough, though, the lights went out last night for about an hour. I think it was tied to some severe storms in the area. It was mildly annoying (I had just put dinner in the microwave to reheat), but the laptop has its own battery and the wireless router and cable modem are on an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), so I just read email and surfed the 'net for the hour... :-)

We rarely lose power up here in VT in summer. But in winter a blizzard can make things dark for a couple days. So we have a portable generator for lights and a woodstove for heat. We use the woodstove as our primary heat source anyway so when the power goes out we really don't care. As a matter of fact, during the last power failure, we didn't even fire up the generator.

It's amazing how quiet things can become when the power goes out. All that background noise we never hear can be deafening when it stops.

But during the winter, the silence is a wonder. And when families are gathered around the hearth on a snowy December eve, all seems right with the world.

Like Christopher, we get most of our power outages in the winter from snow and ice storms (and more often from people crashing into utility poles). We were without power last night for about 7 hours though, after a fast but nasty thunderstorm, and I was miserable - not a breath of air moving outside or in, high humidity (the air was so thick it was almost hard to breathe), 85 degrees at midnight. Yesterday was the hottest day we've had in years. The house was an oven but the mosquitoes were swarming outside, made me wish for a screened porch! DH managed to get to sleep but I spent most of the night in a tepid bathtub. We're pretty close to the hospital so normally our power comes back very quickly, something big must have happened last night.

Yeah, I know. Whine whine. What did people 200 years ago do without air conditioning blah blah. :-) I get heatstroke at the drop of a hat so I was having a tough time of it.