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Don’t let power outages ground your business

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You may not have heard what caused last week’s Delta Airlines computer shutdown that grounded 15,000 flights and stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers worldwide for more than 24 hours. It was a local power outage in the part of Atlanta where Delta is headquartered.

There’s a lesson for businesses of all sizes in this: You never know when or where a power outage can occur. You do know that when it does, it can make your business as dead as Delta’s was.

 

Your business doesn’t have 15,000 passenger flights throughout the world each day. And it doesn’t bring in $5.9 billion a year in adjusted pre-tax income. But the smaller your business, the more devastating a full-day outage can be. Continue reading “Don’t let power outages ground your business”

How much should an hour of electricity cost?

Posted on by developer

8.8.12-Power-Outage

About 3 PM Monday, May 12, a substation equipment failure knocked out power in Cumberland, MD, and Mineral County, WV.

It wasn’t until 4 PM that Potomac Edison sent repair crews to the scene.

And it wasn’t until 7 PM – four hours later – that all 3,000 customers who’d been without electricity got it back.

Though backup generators kicked in at households that had them, their power came at a cost. Backup generators burn propane at the rate of four gallons per hour. At $4 per gallon of propane, that’s $16 per hour to keep the lights on and the refrigerator cold. For a four-hour outage, that’s $64.

Do the arithmetic, and you’ll see that for a two-day outage, like the ones that hit towards the beginning of this year, you could be spending $768 just for two days of electricity.

A battery backup bank, on the other hand, costs $0 per hour to keep your lights and your appliances powered. That’s because instead of costly propane, its “fuel” is free. It’s the sun, which rises every morning and powers Milestone Solar arrays even on cloudy days.

And adding a battery backup bank to your Milestone Solar system costs no more than a backup generator – sometimes less.

Click here or call us at 866-688-4274 to learn if a Milestone Solar system is right for your home or business. (Even the call is free.)

 

There’s no telling when the power will go out – or why

Posted on by developer

Power outages can happen at the worst times and for the strangest reasons.

Take the morning of Friday, September 20, when the new iPhone5 was set to go on sale.

It was minutes before 8 AM in Bethesda, MD. A line of customers, eager to buy, stretched from the door of the Apple store all the way around the block. As the Wall Street Journal Washwire blog posted,

…just moments before the suburban Washington store was set to open at 8 a.m., the power went out, according to buyers’ and local news reporters’ posts on Twitter. A call to the Apple store went unanswered. Local power company Pepco later confirmed there was a power outage.

In fact, the power went out for the whole block that the would-be iPhone buyers were lined up around. “Whole block went dark,” one of them tweeted.

The outage’s cause was just as strange as its timing. “A squirrel made contact with our equipment and caused a fault,” @PepcoConnect tweeted. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

Squirrels have been causing lots of outages recently. They keep knocking out the power in downtown Lynchburg, VA, for example, costing consumers time and businesses lost sales – and that’s more than an “inconvenience.”

Of course, if the Bethesda Apple store, or the Lynchburg downtown merchants, had Milestone Solar systems with battery backup, the outage wouldn’t have inconvenienced them one bit.

The lights would have stayed on, the doors open. They’d have been able to ring up sales and earn profits. And if the outage had been a long one, the sealed battery backup bank would have been recharging every second the sun was in the sky.

If a constant power supply matters to you, contact us for a free solar, consultation and learn more about our battery backup. After all, you never know when a squirrel might strike again.

 

 

A squirrel leaves downtown Lynchburg powerless

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Yesterday morning, a squirrel knocked out electrical power along Main, Commerce and Twelve Streets in Lynchburg, VA.

According to WSET-TV, some 1,159 Appalachian Power customers – not just homes, but also downtown businesses – were without electricity for hours. Even downtown traffic lights were knocked out.

Lots of things can cause outages – high winds that knock down power lines, snow storms that ice up the lines and break them, even a random squirrel.

But whatever the cause, if an outage hits your area, a Milestone Solar system with backup battery bank will keep your lights on, day and night. With no flammable fuels, no toxic gas emissions. And with automatic recharging from a dependable power source that rises every morning.