Stephen King’s novel, Under the Dome, takes place in a fictional town in Maine called Chester’s Mill. The town is completely cut off from the outside world. This means that its power lines have been cut as well, so the only electricity the folks have is generated within the town (under the dome). Essential to the plot is the fact that every business and home in Chester’s Mill has a propane-powered generator.
My question is, is it typical in Maine for homes and businesses to have whole-home generators? No one in the story seems to have difficulty switching over to their private generators. Here in Texas, people may have a small generator tucked away in the garage, but few people have generators set up to run the whole house. Major businesses have some sort of UPS for their computers and other essential systems, but those won’t run indefinitely.
It’s certainly not universal (and they wouldn’t all be propane), but it is pretty common for houses and some types of businesses. We sometimes get ice storms that leave people without power for over a week.
The reason generators here in New England are likely to be wired in (which doesn’t mean they can run a whole houseful of appliances) is that the main thing you need electricity for is the furnace, so your pipes don’t freeze. Non-electric heat still needs electric blowers.
So is a wired-in generator something that would be typical for a high-end home, or would more modestly priced homes have them? What happens to people who have homes, but live in the poorer sections of town, when these ice storms cut off power? Do shelters open for people who need them? What other fuels are used? Propane plays a significant part of the plot in King’s novel.
I don’t live in Maine, but out here in the Midwest home generators are not uncommon due to our own violent weather and potentially deadly climate. Home generators are also becoming more common, and as noted are typically used to run just a part of the house, basically essential appliances like heating, a refrigerator, maybe a light or two but not everything. Some people deem the basement sump pumps the most important thing to keep running.
Around here smaller such typically run on gasoline, but I think some of the larger ones made integral to the house may run on natural gas. We don’t do much stand-along propane out here but in areas where it’s a common fuel that’s probably one option people use.
Some of them you plug the appliances into, some are wired into the home electrical system. While a high end home is more likely to have a sophisticated system, when the power is out around here you see generators not just on upscale homes but also on single-wide trailers on occasion.
People without generators whose homes become unlivable in a matter of days would either move in with family/friends/neighbors or go to shelters of one sort or another (warming shelter in winter, cooling in summer, and so forth).
I’d say about half the houses in my area have propane generators. We occasionally lose power for a week. I live in a rural area with frequent thunderstorms.
If you live in a place with frequent power outages in the winter, it is obligatory to have heating methods that don’t depend on electricity. This is achieved by the simple expedient of having a wood stove. Note that this might keep only one room really warm, so the procedure is to close up all the other rooms and put sleeping bags in the living room and sleep there.
Sort of. I haven’t finished the book yet, but air pollution is becoming a factor for the inhabitants. The dome also does not allow for adequate water flow. Right now, it’s October in Maine and the outside world is dealing with the chilly weather typical of that part of the country while the people inside the Dome are sweltering in contained heat and foul air.
Well, there are a few technically weak parts of the story, and one of them concerns people running out of oxygen after a big propane fire. The dome is much too big to consume its oxygen by burning propane the way they describe. Gasses generally take around a thousand times the volume they occupy as liquids, so they expand by a factor of ten in each orthogonal dimension. Picture the propane tanks in the story ten times larger, linearly. Now, burning that propane will consume a similar volume of oxygen, or all the oxygen from five times larger a volume of air. This dome is huge, its dimensions in miles.
Also, the experts deal with the slight permeability to air by aiming fans at the dome to force some fresh air in. You don’t blow fans at something to force a gas through it, you clamp a cofferdam on it and pressurize that.
It isn’t hard to imagine that propane “genneys” are over represented in this story. Better to it King some slack on the technical details and just enjoy the story.
Propane is C3H8, so complete combustion with oxygen needs 5 O2, resulting in 3 CO2 + 4H2O, so it would actually use 5 times as much oxygen as you describe.
You’re probably still right about it being too little to matter in such a large dome.
I’m in Vermont, not Maine, but home generators are pretty common here. Not everyone has them, not by a long shot, but they’re advertised all over the place. I’d get one if I could afford it.