HinesSight

PGE tree clearing crew were artists at what they do

Yesterday a Portland General Electric (PGE) tree clearing crew was working in our neighborhood prior to the restoration of power following a massive ice storm.

We and our neighbors had been without electricity for 11 days at this point. So it was a joy to finally see PGE repair activity occurring.

Laurel, my wife, had noticed a PGE truck in the driveway of our neighbor to the south on Lake Drive in rural south Salem, where a tree was in contact with an electrical line.

She walked over to talk to the crew to make sure that they knew about a similar situation on our property. Some large branches were leaning against the line that leads from a power pole near our house to the house just north of us.

After she showed the crew chief where the problem was, he walked back to his truck and led the other two crew members to the location.

I decided to watch them do their tree clearing thing. The photo below shows part of the tangled maze of branches that had come down in the ice storm. Our neighbor's house is visible on the right.

The fence between our properties was intact, though a gate had been knocked loose. 

The other two members of the crew followed the chief's lead. I was impressed by the light-hearted energy of all three PGE employees. It was late in the day, about 4:30 pm. They'd been working long hours for many days. 

Yet they joked around, kidding each other. It was apparent that they had a lot of respect for the crew chief -- well-deserved, as I'll describe below.

It turned out that the crew chief, whose name I didn't get, had worked for Elwood's Tree Service before PGE. My wife and I have used Elwood's often on our ten acres. The crew chief remembered coming out to our property several times.

I didn't take photos of the initial part of the tree clearing effort.

That started with the crew chief picking up a rope with a loop at the end, swinging it around his head like a cowboy steer roper, and throwing it high up toward the end of a large branch, or tree, that was leaning against the electrical line.

He got the loop over the top of the branch on the first try. Really impressive. Then he threw the rest of the rope over the line. From there he and a crew member were able to pull on the line and get the branch, or tree, to topple safely. This is the crew chief.

That left a couple of other branches that were leaning against the wire. If you look closely the wire is visible about a third of the way from the top of the photo below, angling upward.

It was interesting to listen to the discussion as to how to deal with the branches. One of the crew members pointed to a branch and suggested they do that one first. 

But the crew chief said, no, no. Thinking several moves ahead like a chess master, he pointed out how difficult it would be if they dealt with that branch, then the other one. I didn't follow the conversation all that clearly, since I was standing a ways distant.

What impressed me was how the crew chief was able to size up the various aspects of the branch problem and quickly figure out the best approach. 

The photo below shows him using a long pole saw to remove a "hanger," I think they called it, that was keeping the large branch dangling on the wire.

I then made a video of the final stage of the branch removal. At one point you can see the dangling branch pushing the wire back and forth. My wife was watching from closer to our house.

She could see our power pole swaying, which shows how heavy the branch was. I was worried the electrical line was going to break, but they must be pretty darn strong, since it didn't.

This wasn't an easy job. There was no way to get a truck with a lift anywhere near the electrical line, so all they had to work with was a chainsaw, rope, and the long extension pole. 

Since a PGE guy in a truck had told my wife that power can't be turned on to a house if a branch is touching the line, we were deeply appreciative of the tree crew doing what they did, when they did it -- an hour or so before power came back on in most of our neighborhood.

We had to wait for power until this morning, along with three other homes in Spring Lake Estates.

Ice storm conversation highlights

Tonight our monthly Salon discussion group met via Zoom.

Laurel, my wife, was able to host the meeting even though electricity is still off in our rural south Salem neighborhood, thanks to our generator and the Starlink satellite internet system.

Not surprisingly, most of the conversation centered around the recent ice storm and resulting power outages. We all shared our stories of how we're coping.

Here's some themes that emerged in the course of our 100 minute discussion.

How to prepare for no electricity. Some people favor going the green route. Others the fossil fuel route. Since we live in the country, with our nearest neighbor quite distant, I extolled the virtues of our 7,000 watt Honda generator, which naturally runs on gasoline.

One downside of a generator is noise. They aren't quiet, though smaller Honda generators make little noise. We have a transfer switch that enables various outlets/devices in our house to switch over to generator power when a cable is attached to an outside connector. The generator also powers our well pump.

But a generator isn't great to use in a city, unless you like annoying your neighbors. So the city dwellers in our group talked about solar-powered battery options. Of course, if there isn't much sunlight, recharging would be problematic. Tesla offers large batteries that can connect to their electric cars, if I have this right. 

On a smaller scale, there are batteries (we have a Goal Zero one) that, once charged, can power a cell phone, computer, and such for quite a while. 

It was agreed that having a working fireplace or wood stove is a great idea, though you need a decent supply of wood. A pellet stove can be installed either as a freestanding stove or as a fireplace insert. They require electricity, but not a whole lot. Just a few hundred watts, I believe, which could be supplied by a small outdoor gas generator and an extension cord.

With all the fallen trees and branches from the ice storm, many homes have a plentiful supply of wood. Having that available to burn during the next power outage is a good idea, assuming someone has a fireplace or wood stove.

Independence versus reliance on society. Most of our group lives in single family homes, while several live in apartments. One of the apartment dwellers made an interesting point.

Rather than everybody figuring out on their own how to survive without electricity, that effort would be better spent on working on a societal level to make it less likely that power outages will occur. For example, electrical lines could be underground rather than strung along poles next to or under trees.

Amazingly, several people who were children in Europe during World War II said that power never went off during air raids. I couldn't resist saying, "Sounds like PGE wasn't operating in England or Germany." 

Their point was that it is possible to make electrical systems much more resistant to outages. In modern Europe, virtually all power is underground. And people recalled that in their younger days, power outages seemed to be less common than now. The rise of giant profit-driven utility companies could be a reason for this.

I said that today I'd talked with a neighbor during an afternoon dog walk. He told me that he'd worked for a citizen utility in Iowa akin to Salem Electric. Ice and snow storms are common in Iowa. When they occurred, crews from citizen utilities in neighboring states would rush in to help.

A balance needs to be struck, I guess. Each of us should prepare for a power outage, and we also need to urge politicians to spend tax money on measures to prevent outages from occurring. Personally, I'd like to see PGE broken up into a bunch of smaller citizen-owned companies like Salem Electric. 

One of our members lives in West Salem. She said her power was restored just a few hours after it went out. Me, I have PGE and am still waiting for electricity to come back on eight days after the storm.

Staying in touch with others. My wife and I are stressed from our lengthy power outage. But we felt much better after our group meeting this evening. We humans need other people. Isolation is bad for all sorts of reasons.

A couple in our group live in a close-knit neighborhood. After the storm hit, they said that phones (land line variety, since cell phones weren't working well, if at all) were ringing many times a day as a neighbor would either express a need of their own, or what someone else needed.

In this fashion people were able to band together to help each other get through the ice storm aftermath. Those with chain saws aided those who didn't have one. People who had something to share gave it to people in need of it. Self-reliance is fine. Community support is even better.

For a few days after the storm hit, our cell phone coverage was almost nonexistent. We had to walk up our long driveway to get a decent signal. For almost a week, our land line phone didn't work. This produced a feeling of isolation in us.

Which gets back to the notion that our society needs to invest in ways to keep people connected, both during emergencies and at other times. 

Cellular systems should be made more resilient so cell phones aren't useless after an ice storm. Ditto for internet systems like the one offered by Comcast. I noted that it made a big difference when our Starlink satellite internet system continued to work just fine after the storm.

It felt good to be able to keep up with the news, Facebook, Twitter, and such. For several days we couldn't talk to people by phone. Keeping in touch via broadband raised my spirits in the ice storm aftermath. Yet many people in the United States don't have access to fast broadband.

PGE getting well-deserved ice storm criticism

First off, I want to say that I'm as thankful as anyone for the PGE crews that are working to restore power to the hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who are without electricity after the recent massive ice and snow storm. 

But I'm a believer in the middle way: give credit where credit is due, and assign blame where blame is due. PGE deserves some of each.

(PGE stands for Portland General Electric, not to be confused with PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric, a Calfornia utility.)

My main gripe with PGE is their decision to stop giving estimates for when power will be restored to an outage area. My wife and I lost power around 8 pm or so last Friday, February 12. 

When I reported the outage via the PGE phone line that night, the automated message said that power could be restored at 6:30 pm on Saturday. On Saturday, the message said 6:30 pm on Sunday. On Sunday, the message said 8:45 am on Monday. On Monday, PGE stopped providing any estimate of when our power would be restored.

That's crazy. You'd think that as more information was learned about outages in Oregon, PGE would have more accurate estimates of when people would have electricity back. But the opposite happened.

That's highly unusual.

Living as we do in rural south Salem for the past 31 years, we've experienced many power outages. Not once has PGE failed to provide an estimate for when power would be restored. Often that estimate was inaccurate, but it sure makes us feel better to know that our neighborhood is on a schedule for repair work.

This screenshot shows what PGE currently is reporting for our address -- four freaking days after our power went out.

Let's decipher this lack of pertinent information, which so far as I can tell is similar to what PGE is reporting for most people in Oregon who lack power.

First, the cause wasn't heavy snow. It was ice. If you think this is a minor quibble, look to the bottom diagram that leads from "Power Out" to "Power Restored."

PGE makes it seem like after a crew was dispatched, the cause was determined. Well, it doesn't take any investigative work to figure out that the ice storm in our part of Marion County caused the power outage. 

The real question is what happened during the ice storm that caused the outage in our area of 503 customers affected. I can only speak about our specific neighborhood of about 95 customers in Spring Lake Estates.

Every day I walk our dog past a downed power line on Lake Drive, our street.

I can see that a big tree near 10161 Lake Drive collapsed the power line when it fell during the storm. The line snapped. Part of the line is on the ground. Some of the line is suspended about six feet over a Lake Drive lane.

I've talked with a PGE employee who answers the downed power line option on their phone system. I've told her what I just said above. I've pointed out that the poles on both sides of the downed line are intact, so seemingly it would be pretty easy to reattach a line between the poles.

Yet so far there's been no sign of any PGE activity in our neighborhood. 

So what's up with that "Crew Dispatched" item in between "Power Out" and "Cause Determined"? It's clear that dispatched means something different in power company lingo than in ordinary English. 

To most people, including me, when someone is dispatched to a problem, like a police officer responding to a 911 call, it means a human being is in motion to handle whatever needs to be dealt with. But here's how Duke Energy defines that term.

Dispatched/Assigned: A repair crew has been assigned to restore service and will proceed to the location as soon as the crew is available. Enroute: The crew is on the way to make repairs. Onsite/Arrived: The crew has arrived at the location where repairs are needed.

PGE must use the same definition, since like I said, there's been zero sign of repair activity at the downed lines even though a crew has been dispatched. So it appears that our neighborhood outage is on a PGE list for some repair work at an undisclosed future date.

When will our power be restored? PGE says in the screenshot, "Not available at this time." Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. Could be a month from now. 

If PGE knows, they sure aren't telling. And that irks a lot of other people besides me. 

The Portland General twitter account has been sharing tweets like this one from this morning.

I enjoy swiping right on my iPhone and reading responses from Oregonians. Some thank PGE for working to restore power. Others are critical. Here's a sampling of those.

Regarding that last tweet from Poonam, this morning I called the PGE outage number and waited on hold for 12 minutes until a live human being came on the line.

He was polite, unrushed, and refreshingly open with me. I appreciated that a lot.

After he listened to my gripe about PGE not having any estimate for when our power would be restored, and talking about how difficult it is for rural residents lacking generators who have wells that don't function without electricity, he said that he agreed with me. 

Here's how I described our conversation in a post this morning on our neighborhood's Facebook page.

I talked with a PGE customer service guy a little while ago. I expressed my frustration at how PGE no longer is giving estimates for when power will be restored to an area. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday there were estimates. Starting Monday, those stopped.

 

He agreed with me that it would be good if PGE could just say something like, "Our best guess is that your power will be restored in a week if everything goes as planned." He said he'd pass my concern on to a supervisor.

 

I mentioned that a PGE spokesman has said it could be "many days" before power is restored to everybody. OK, but what does that mean? FIve days? Two weeks? A month? Two months? it's hard to plan to survive this outage without at least a general sense of how long our electricity will be off.

 

The PGE guy said that major transmission lines are a big problem. Those need to be fixed before power can be restored farther down the line. I came away feeling like I'd been heard, though we still have no idea when Spring Lake Estates will get power back.

 

Lastly, being a progressive, I rarely agree with Republican politicians. But state House Republican Leader Christine Drazan has an excellent idea, according to the Oregonian. The Oregon legislature shouldn't resume until all Oregonians have power.

 

Oregon House Democrats have been discussing with Republicans whether [to] resume operations Wednesday. The caucus and some caucus members have used social media to express their concerns and share information to help Oregonians affected by power outages.

 

Drazan said Tuesday the focus should stay there. “We need to keep our focus on serving constituents and the most vulnerable while we await power to be restored. Our work in the legislature should come back online once the power does.”

 

UPDATE: I've gotten some comments on Facebook about this blog post that spurred me to write this response:

 

I said in my blog post that I respect the crews who are working. It's PGE management I don't respect. If you'd read my post before commenting on it, you would have seen that I made ZERO criticisms of the crews working to restore power.

 

I live in a rural area where everyone has wells that need electricity to work. So many people don't have water. I read their comments on our neighborhood's Facebook page. They're very disturbing. Naturally my wife and I have offered to provide water to people, since we have a generator.

 

It is much more difficult to plan for dealing with this outage when PGE persists in not providing even a rough estimate of when power will be restored. Many people out here have livestock, like horses, llamas, and goats. They need water also.

 

When PGE keeps people in the dark, communication-wise, it hurts peoples' ability to cope with the physical dark every night without electricity. 

Our dog is enjoying no electricity. Me, not so much.

Out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, we've been without electricity for two days after a big ice storm caused trees to topple and electrical lines to crumple.

My wife and I sleep in different bedrooms. We have a wood stove, but the heat from it doesn't reach to where I sleep.

I toughed out the first night without electricity, though naturally my room was much colder than usual, Last night I decided that I'd sleep on a blow-up bed. I put it in the living room, which is close to the wood stove in our open-plan house.

Our Husky mix, Mooka, greeted me in the morning. (She sleeps in an area close to my wife, so Mooka gets up when Laurel does.) It took our dog about three seconds to decide that the best greeting would be to jump on the blow-up bed, with me in it.

Since, Mooka has rarely left the bed. It's her new favorite place. So at least our dog is enjoying what comes with no electricity.  Me, not so much.

Being a modern liberated couple who disdain traditional sex roles, we've been equitably sharing the additional work that comes with non-electrical life after an ice storm.

After we get up, Laurel brings in firewood from outside to keep the wood stove going that day. Then she makes a fire with newspaper, kindling, and small pieces of wood. After that, she tends the fire until it is going nicely and starts to heat the house.

Me, I go out to the carport and turn the start key on our generator. Then I make my breakfast and relax, having done my part to keep our household running smoothly. Like I said, Laurel and I share household chores equitably.

Oh, forgot to mention that last night Laurel found the box in our garage that the blow-up bed was in, brought it inside, plugged in the pump, filled up the bed with air, and made the bed with sheets and two blankets.

I then turned down the bed coverings before I went to sleep. Again, we have a 50-50 marriage.

However, when it comes to outside work, I do 100% of the tasks when it comes to using our Stihl backpack blower and chainsaw -- both of which came in handy the past few days given how many tree limbs came down in our large yard during the ice storm. 

Yesterday I saw that the quart of chainsaw bar oil was almost gone. So this morning I set out on a mission to drive into Salem and get more bar oil, along with filling up two empty five gallon gasoline cans in case we need to use our generator for another few days.

There was a bit of a line at the south Salem Shell gas station I always go to. The attendant said that people had seen on the news last night that a long line had formed at a Woodburn gas station after the ice storm.

He added, "There's plenty of gas, though." I noted that the same thing happened with toilet paper last year when Covid lockdowns led to panic buying, quickly adding that I really did need gasoline for our generator. He agreed.

I neglected to mention that when toilet paper became available again last spring, or maybe it was early summer, I went overboard and bought so much that we're still using it up. The attendant made fun of someone he knows who acquired such a supple of toilet paper, it had to be stored in their garage.

Which is where we keep some of our supply -- another thing I didn't mention.

When I went to Ace Hardware for the bar oil, I immediately noted that the parking lot was unusually full. When I got inside, a line of people waiting to check out extended almost all of the way to the back of the store. 

Soon I found myself at the end of it, clutching a gallon of chainsaw bar oil. 

This wasn't panic buying. It was people getting what they needed to cope with the ice storm. The guy in front of me with the baby carriage had bought a chain saw. I heard him tell a salesman that he needed one long enough to cope with a large tree that had fallen down.

When I got home, I did some additional driveway blowing, branch hauling, and chainsawing of branches. Well, until the chain fell off my saw, which not surprisingly put an end to my chainsawing.

I'm pretty clueless about chainsaw maintenance, so my plan is to take it in to Ace Hardware tomorrow, a Stihl dealer, and hope that even though chainsaw sales have been brisk, chainsaw repair and tuneups won't take all that long.

Regarding tonight, I'm going to do my best to avoid having to sleep on the dog bed while Mooka sleeps on the blow-up bed. A handful of dog treats should do the trick at luring her off my bed -- my go-to dog training device.

Photos of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021

l've lived in Oregon for 50 years. I've seen plenty of freezing rain. But I've never experienced anything like the ice storm that struck northwest Oregon yesterday. 

Here's photos that I took this morning as my wife and I surveyed the damage to our property in rural south Salem, which was considerable.

The ice was amazingly thick. Up near Lake Drive this twig had ice the width of my index finger, about 5/8 of an inch. 

The walkway outside our front door was littered with fir branches. Trees and shrubs were bending over from the weight of the ice.

There was a certain beauty to the ice. But the damage it did to our yard was anything but beautiful. 

The saddest sight was seeing several large limbs that had fallen from a white oak that was more than two hundred years old, according to an arborist. It's the centerpiece of our yard. Hard to believe that it had survived so long, only to be decimated yesterday. Hopefully it will survive, though I have my doubts.

The oak branches littered the lawn in front of our deck. We'd heard loud crashes while watching TV last night. (We have a generator, as our power had gone out.) It was too dark to see what had happened. In the morning, we knew.

Some oak branches, along with other tree debris, had fallen near and into our water feature. A bird bath was frozen.

A bird feeder was festooned with icicles.

The brush and trees on the path that leads to Spring Creek were a vision in white. But after I'd seen what the ice had done to the big oak, I looked upon the whiteness as malevolent. Of course, nature doesn't have intentions, so that doesn't make sense. I still felt that way, though.


Imagine how much force it takes to split a thick branch from the trunk of a tree. Ice is powerful.


Last year we had a fairly large oak removed from our dog yard because it was so close to our house -- a fire danger, with branches overhanging the roof. I was glad we did this, since it could have caused considerable damage if the ice had caused it to topple over. 

We were fortunate to not have any large branches strike our roof or deck. Not as fortunate was a beautiful large purple-leaved Japanese Maple that was struck squarely by one of the heavy fallen oak branches. All that is left of it is the dark piece of trunk in the middle of the photo. Sad. It was my wife's favorite tree in our yard.


Many branches from two tall firs at the bottom of our driveway were scattered about. But the firs did much better than other trees with the ice, probably because fir branches bend so easily. Oaks are strong, but rigid. "Be like water," I recall Bruce Lee saying. Good advice for both trees and us humans.


A bunch of branches were strewn around the turnaround part of our driveway. 


Brush near the upper part of our driveway was oozing ice.


Since our driveway is "Y" shaped, I had two choices as to where to park my Subaru Crosstrek near Lake Drive. (Our steep driveway is partly shaded, so I was worried that freezing rain would linger on it, making it difficult to get out after the storm ended.) Not surprisingly, I chose a location with no overhanging branches. Turned out our driveway wasn't icy at all, strangely.

It was great that the two tall firs that tower over our house made it through the ice storm with minor damage. I was sleeping in a room that could be under them if they toppled over, a thought that occasionally went through my mind last night.

Seeing the large oak in our back yard so damaged is a recurring pain. It is entirely possible to have an intimate relationship with a tree. I know, because I've had many conversations with what I've called my Old Friend. 

Mark Cuban is right. National Anthem is way over-played.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, is no longer playing the National Anthem, a.k.a. The Star Spangled Banner, before home basketball games.

Good for Cuban. 

UPDATE: Bad for Cuban. He gave in to the NBA. 

The National Anthem has nothing to do with genuine patriotism. Neither does the Pledge of Allegiance. Neither does the American flag. 

We could get rid of all three, except for very special occasions, and our country not only would be just fine, it would be even better.

Why? Because nationalism is divisive. Also, ridiculous. People in every country believe that they live in the greatest country on earth. 

The United States is no exception. There's nothing wrong with that belief, aside from the obvious fact that it is just that -- a belief, not reality. Our country does some things well and other things poorly.

So let's simply say that we love the country we're living in, just as other people love their own country. There's no reason to make public displays of country affection commonplace. 

After all, European countries don't play national anthems before soccer games, nor are they obsessed with pledges of allegiance.

I know a woman whose family came here from Germany who can't understand the American habit of singing the national anthem before sporting events. That's just plain weird in her more expansive view of what patriotism is all about.

Nancy Armour of USA Today has an opinion piece about Cuban's decision. Here's how it starts out.

Good for Mark Cuban.

The Dallas Mavericks owner made a decision that is sure to bring howls of outrage, threats to boycott his team and an avalanche of vile and vicious emails. But it was the right decision, and I hope it gives others in professional and college sports the courage, or at least cover, to do the same.

The Mavericks are no longer playing the national anthem before home games. I don’t know the reasoning behind Cuban’s decision, and he’s declined to elaborate further, both to The Athletic, which first reported the absence of the anthem, and USA TODAY Sports.

But he hinted at it last summer, when he said he supported Mavericks players and coaches who were kneeling during the anthem to protest racial injustice following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many other Black men and women.

“The National Anthem Police in this country are out of control,” Cuban said on Twitter. “If you want to complain, complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work.”

He’s right. We don’t play The Star-Spangled Banner before concerts or movies. We don’t hear it at rec league soccer games or school plays. We don’t stand at attention and listen to it before we start our workdays.

If it doesn’t belong at those events – and clearly it doesn’t since there hasn’t been any widespread movement to make it a staple of our daily routine – it doesn’t belong at college and professional sporting events, either.

Here is where a segment of the population will say that anyone who dares suggest doing away with the anthem should move to China or North Korea and see how we like things there. The irony of which never escapes me. Requiring the anthem to be played before sporting events, and using it as some Rorschach test for how much you love your country, is the exact kind of faux display of patriotism those authoritarian regimes excel at.

There are no doubt some who are deeply moved by The Star-Spangled Banner, and see it as a way to honor those who have and do serve this country. But there are also those for whom it is a reminder of this country’s failings, and the work we still need to do to achieve true equality.

USA broadband sucks. In rural south Salem, it sucks more.

Having fast internet no longer is a luxury, if it ever was.

A year into the Covid crisis, it's clear that access to genuine broadband -- defined by the FCC as at least 25 megabits per second download (25 Mbps) and three megabits per second (3 Mbps) upload -- is a necessity. 

Distance learning can't happen without it. Working from home can't happen without it. Keeping in touch with friends and family can't happen without it. Streaming entertainment can't happen without it.

OK, I've exaggerated a bit. 

Those things can happen with slower internet. However, I speak from experience when I say that it is much more difficult to do them when you have a 6 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload speed (6/2 in broadband shorthand). 

That's what I've had to deal with for many years out here in the "wilds" of rural south Salem, a whole six miles from the city limit of Oregon's capital.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the 157 million people in the United States, almost half the population, who don't have the 25/3 speed that separates genuine broadband from crappy broadband like our DSL that arrives at our house over a copper phone line that is almost fifty years old.

About two weeks ago I was chosen to be a beta tester for the Starlink satellite internet system. It's a project of Elon Musk's Space X company. Starlink is working well for us, by and large. 

There are occasional interruptions and marked variation in download/upload speeds.

That's to be expected of a system that is still under development. At the moment I'm writing this blog post with a Starlink speed of 34/7. That download speed is lower than it usually is, but at least it is within the bounds of the 25/3 broadband definition.

My wife and I could afford the $499 Starlink purchase cost, plus $99 for a roof mount.

When testing is over and Space X starts charging the expected $99 a month fee, we'll be happy to dump our CenturyLink DSL and pay about forty dollars a month more for much faster broadband (likely at least 150 Mbps down and 10 up).

However, that's too much for many Americans. Broadband, like health care, shouldn't be available only to those with the ability to pay the full cost of it.

Our country needs to set a goal of making broadband available to everybody within a fairly short period of time, like five years. Hopefully the Biden administration will make this part of a program that modernizes our crumbling/inadequate infrastructure, which includes broadband access.

As noted before, I live six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital. A few years ago the average download speed in Mongolia was 5.25 Mbps. That's close to the 6 Mbps we've "enjoyed" (not!) from our DSL. 

So it isn't an exaggeration to say that in rural south Salem our internet speed is about the same as if we were in Outer Mongolia. 

That would be funny if it didn't reflect a huge problem: the unfair gap between broadband have's and have-not's in our country. This is partly due to the high cost of broadband, but in many or most cases it is a question of availability. 

Like lots of people who live in a rural area, we have exactly zero choice when it comes to an internet provider. I know, because I've checked out every possibility and come up with nothing other than the crappy DSL we suffered with prior to Starlink coming into our life. 

No cable companies out here. No fast cellular internet out here (we don't have a line of sight to a cell tower). No fiber optic out here. 

Again, this isn't literally Outer Mongolia, but it might as well be. We're a few miles from Oregon's second largest city. Yet until Starlink came along we were doomed to "broadband" with a speed less than 1/4 as fast as how the FCC defines that term.

I'll end by describing what life is like at 6Mbps for those who have never experienced internet at that speed.

In short, you do a lot of waiting.
Want to read a news story? You click on the link and wait. Want to upload a video to You Tube? You wait a really long time. Want to watch a movie on Netflix? Often it starts, then you wait while the video buffers (a few minutes later this may happen again). Want to download an operating system update? When Big Sur was available for my MacBook Pro, it took 12 hours to download; it failed to install the first time, so then it took another 12 hours to try again.

I'm 72. I'm retired. I'm not working from home or going to school from home.

So even though I'm a writer with three blogs and hate how much time I've wasted because of our slow DSL, I feel even more sorry for those whose job or education is made much more difficult by the lack of fast broadband. 

This needs to change. President Biden and Congress, do something about it!

 

 

 

Honey-Do is a great Salem handyman service

Today I was impressed again by the quality work that Laine Larson did for us via his Honey-Do Handyman Service. Laine is a neighbor, so during a dog walk this afternoon I took this photo of the back of his trailer so I could share it in this laudatory blog post.

For many years Laine was a State Farm Insurance agent. Now he's into the handyman thing, and doing it very well. My wife and I have used him for several projects that exceeded my decidedly minimal husbandly handyman capability.

Laine is very easy to work with. Honest, straightforward, pleasant, reliable. I'll describe what Laine did for us today, as it reflects why a handyman like Laine is so valuable. 

As I described in a recent blog post, the Space X Starlink satellite internet system  that I was selected to be a Beta tester for is working well for us -- hugely better than the slow CenturyLink DSL that we've had to endure at our rural south Salem home where prior to Starlink there haven't been any viable broadband alternatives (our DSL isn't really broadband, not with a speed of 7 Mbps).

So I phoned Laine and told him that we needed to have the cable secured from the Starlink dish on our roof down to the spot on an outside wall where a hole needed to be drilled into our living room, where the Starlink router was located.

(During our initial test of the Starlink we'd left a sliding door slightly ajar so the cable would fit through it.)

I'd gotten a Cable Routing & Wall Penetration Kit from Starlink, but I'd noticed that the description of the kit started off with, "Designed for customers with prior internet cable routing experience and installation; must be comfortable drilling through walls."

Well, I had zero internet cable routing experience and wasn't comfortable drilling through walls. Which caused me to call Laine.

When he came to our house this afternoon I showed him what the kit contained: a spade bit, drill bit, cable routing tool, silicone sealant, grommets, and wall clips. The screw-in clips were to hold the cable in place along the fifty feet or so between the Starlink dish on our roof and the router in our living room.

Laine took the clips up on the roof, but he ended up not using them. Instead, he had a more elegant solution -- a coax cable staple gun that used an oval-shaped staple. 

This turned out to be the only way the cable could be attached at the top of the slanted roof overhang above our deck, since a cordless drill wouldn't have had enough room to drive in the screw that holds a clip in place. Plus, the clips would have been a lot more visible than the staples,

So not only is Laine a skilled handyman who can do what you want done, he also can come up with better ways to do what you want done. 

When the cable routing kit arrived from Starlink, I looked at the instructions and thought, "Maybe I could handle this." But what I correctly suspected is that complications would arise that I wouldn't know how to handle, and Laine could.

Give him a call if you're in the Salem, Oregon area and need a handyman: 503-931-8822

Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount

Eight days ago I was happy with the speed of the Starlink satellite internet system that I'd been chosen to be a public beta tester for, but not with the reliability. 

As I said in "My first Starlink beta test: fast but loses satellite connection," it wasn't a surprise that the connection kept dropping, since I had to put the Starlink on its tripod on one of our decks. We live in rural south Salem, Oregon, and our home is surrounded by large oaks and firs.

So I was eager to see how the Starlink did when the Ridgeline Roof Mount I'd ordered arrived, which it did yesterday. 

UPDATE: I've heard from several fellow Beta testers wondering how I was able to order the Ridgeline Roof Mount since it still isn't showing up on the Starlink web site. That was the case when our Starlink arrived, so I put in a support request to Starlink saying I needed the Ridgeline Mount to be able to test the system in a place with a clear view of the sky. I got a response from the support person saying they could order that mount for me, using the credit card they had on file. So give that it a try if you want one. It might work for you also.

Installing the Starlink on our roof was easy. I'd already gone to Lowe's and purchased 16 5-pound red bricks, which were needed to weight the Ridgeline Roof Mount with the required 80 pounds of stability.

Laying a rubber mat on our roofline was easy, as was carrying the Starlink up a ladder in the bag that was included in the Ridgeline Roof Mount kit. The dish popped into the receptacle on the mount with a satisfying click. Then I threw the cable/power cord over the side of the roof, and thence through a sliding glass door into our living room. 

My wife had figured out how to tape some insulation over the crack in the door to keep cold air out. I'd cut a small piece of wood to keep the door from being opened while we tested the Starlink in what hopefully would be its permanent location, after which we could drill a hole for the cable through our siding.

Then came the big moment. Plug in the Starlink, give it some time to find the satellites, wait for the router to come on line, choose "Starlink" for my iPhone's wi-fi network, and see how fast and reliable the Starlink is in its rooftop location. 

Initially the connection dropped a few times, before becoming highly reliable.

We were able to watch an episode of Bridgerton on Netflix with ease, using Starlink wi-fi. It was a joy to see how much crisper the picture was, since our crappy 6 Mbps CenturyLink DSL often forces Netflix to supply us with a fuzzy image, and sometimes no video at all as we wait for buffering to take place.

Eventually we lost the Starlink connection around the time we switch to watching the KGW Portland evening news. When I checked the Statistics page on the Starlink iPhone app before I went to bed, I saw there had been 12 minutes of "Beta Downtime" in the seven hours since our Starlink had been operating.

That must have caused the dropped connection, since the router was showing a red light and wasn't able to reconnect to the satellites. 

In the 27 or so hours the Starlink has been on our roof, download speeds have varied a lot -- from an unusual low of 6 Mbps, to the more typical 40-90 Mbps, all the way to an occasional 140 Mbps. 

I'm beyond happy with both the speed and reliability.

The connection hasn't dropped once due to an obstruction, according to the Statistics I made a screenshot of not long ago. There was no downtime in the last 12 hours due to an obstruction and just 49 seconds when there were no satellites. However, there was a lengthy Beta Downtime of 48 minutes this morning, the price of being a Beta tester. Likely that's an aberration.

As soon as the Starlink app was released a number of months ago, I went up on our roof in the same location the Starlink is now and tried to figure out if these three tall firs and a couple of significant oaks to the north of our house were going to pose an obstruction problem. We own the property they're on, but I wasn't eager to cut down the trees.

Looks like they aren't causing a problem, which is good news.

By the way, that 5 Mb iPhone photo just took 15 seconds to upload to Typepad, my blogging service. With DSL, I have to wait a couple of minutes for a photo to upload. At the moment Starlink has an upload speed of 5.1 Mbps, while our DSL usually is about .75 Mbps.

When I sat on our roof a few months ago in the same place the Starlink is now and checked for obstructions, trying to get the tilt of my iPhone at a more or less correct angle, I was sure those trees were going to be a problem, since they appeared in the lower portion of the Starlink obstruction checker.

But this afternoon I sat next to the Starlink and placed my iPhone alongside the dish at the same angle the dish is at, about 35 degrees, I believe. This is the pleasingly clear screenshot. So I guess the lesson is that it is difficult to tell what, if anything, is going to be an obstruction until someone actually installs a Starlink.


This is the speed test I did a few minutes ago. As noted above, this speed is pretty typical for what we've been getting the past 27 hours. It's great, given that we never get above 7 Mbps with our DSL, and that's on a good day.

 
The Starlink router is generating an acceptable wi-fi signal. It seems to be usable everywhere in our 3,200 square foot house. So all in all, there's little I can criticize about Starlink now that the dish is up on our roof with a clear view of the northern sky. 

Sure, it will be nice to have the Beta Downtime go away, since I don't feel comfortable ditching our DSL until Starlink is more reliable.

But if the outages are limited to a few minutes a day, that's fine. It's easy to shift over to DSL wi-fi, though now that I've experienced the much faster Starlink speed, it is already tough for me to put up with DSL.

A final note: I'm impressed with Starlink support staff. Whenever I've asked them a question, which so far has been limited to the status of an order, they've responded quickly and in a friendly manner. 

My first Starlink beta test: fast but loses satellite connection

Yesterday the long-awaited box from Starlink arrived after I'd been notified that I was able to be part of the public beta test for this groundbreaking effort to bring broadband to underserved areas via thousands of low-altitude satellites. I happily paid for the equipment.

Naturally I was eager to open it up. At first glance, I wondered if somehow they'd forgotten to put the equipment inside.

But no, the goodies were under the cleverly fashioned plastic cover: satellite dish, tripod, router,, and cables.

Showing how old I am (72), I looked around for an installation manual. Then I realized that the sum total of the instructions included in the box were on the sheet that caught my eye when I first opened it up.

So I gathered that you set up the dish, plug it in, then fire up the Starlink app I had on my iPhone. Pleasingly, all the cables and power supply were already inserted into the proper places in the pieces of equipment. 

Since I hadn't gotten the roof mount I'd ordered, and it was nighttime anyway, the only viable option I had for testing the Starlink was to set it up on a small table on our upstairs deck. 

It faces north, where the Starlink satellites are located currently, so that was good. Not good were the many nearby oak and fir trees on our property in rural south Salem, Oregon. Thus I wasn't expecting much from this first test, since our roof has a considerably better view of the sky than the deck.

Getting Starlink up and running was very easy. After plugging the equipment in, and giving the router time to set itself up, I was asked to provide a password for the Starlink wi-fi network. Then I watched the Starlink app as the dish tried to connect with the satellites.

It took a few minutes for a connection to be established. That was exciting, since given the rather crappy location of the dish, I was worried that no connection at all would be possible. 

The app asked me to do a speed test. I did several of them.

They ranged between 26 Mbps and 14o Mbps. Here's a screenshot of the fastest result, which thrilled me -- since our horrible CenturyLink DSL is hugely slower. The second speed test screenshot is from this morning when I was using the DSL wi-fi.

Starlink

CenturyLink DSL

Aside from the much faster Starlink download and upload speeds, it's interesting that the Starlink latency (definition here) is so much lower than the DSL latency, even though obviously the Starlink signal has to go into space and back.

I guess having our internet connection start and finish via copper phone lines isn't so great, something I already knew after suffering through many years of DSL.

Unfortunately, the marvelous Starlink connection only lasted a few minutes before, I assume, a satellite signal was obstructed by the trees. Sometimes the connection was restored quickly, but sometimes it took quite a while. This wasn't surprising, given the location of the dish on our deck and the proximity to the afore-mentioned trees.

The Ridgeline Roof Mount I ordered a few days ago should arrive next week. That will allow me to try placing the Starlink dish in various places on our roof, since the mount is secured by the weight of concrete blocks or bricks rather than being fastened in place by screws.

I suspect the reliability of Starlink will be greater once the dish is on the roof. However, I've checked for obstructions via the Starlink app. One oak and three firs appear to be obstructing a totally clear view of the northern sky, so there's a decent chance we still will have connection interruptions.

Starlink support FAQs say that as more satellites are launched, obstructions will be less of an issue. If we still have a problem with losing the connection after the dish is on the roof, my plan is to ask for advice from Starlink support staff.

Should we have the large trees cut down (they're on our property, a benefit of living on ten acres), or is there a decent chance that upcoming satellite launches will cause any dropped connection problems to fade away? 

Regardless, I'm confident that Starlink will become our conduit to genuine high speed broadband. I'm beyond tired of having to deal with CenturyLink DSL. I've enquired as to whether we ever will get fiber optic out here in the "wilderness" five miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital. 

A CenturyLink manager said, no. The day we can ditch CenturyLink can't come soon enough for me.