Tue, 07 Oct 2003

Shocking

A rather interesting day here - took a lunch break to go get my mom's cat from the vet and take her home to momma. On the road, Kris calls and asks if I could pick up a couple of thirty amp screw base fuses.

We're re-doing our mud porch, and it seems her dad, in his haste , neglected to turn off a fuse panel before attempting to move it out flush with the new wall. To quote the old Batman show: "Zap! Pow! Zowie!"

So of course they assumed they blew out the fuse. I picked up a couple on my way home, but when I went to replace them I noticed that the originals weren't blown. In fact, power was still up at the house, but very strangely. The battery backups were going off like crazy - Kris had downed all the system except the router (we have ISDN as our primary phone source). If you turned on the dining room light, the kitchen light dimmed. Power saws would not spin up to speed. We were 'browned out'. But why?

I quickly came to the conclusion that the little short had backed up the line, probably shorting out the transformer. I called REMC, a tech was dispatched, and he concurred. Unfortunately he was not in a line truck, so another team was dispatched.

And the transformer was fine.

Many hours and much noodling later, it turns out that there was a faulty connection on the break out to our security light, which basically left half of our incoming circuit hanging - at best it was intermittent, at worst it was just gone. Very, very strange, and stranger still was the tech's assurance that it was nothing that my father in law had done to cause it: it was 'just a coincidence'.

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