Electricity woes

Last night was a very long night for us. Around 1 am the power went off. This in and of itself is nothing new. The kids got out of their beds and came into our room as usual, and we all laid there, sweating like crazy, waiting for the power to come back on.

Hours went by.

Finally, about 4:45 am I realized I heard what sounded like the elevator in our building working. How can that be when there is no power? Hmmmm. I came out of our room to discover that apparently it was only our flat that did not have power. The whole rest of the building was working fine.

I decided to venture downstairs to see what the problem was. I discovered that the main panel on the ground floor where the power meter is located was standing wide open. The watchmen (security guard) informed me that during the night something went wrong with the meter so they removed it and would come back around 10 am to fix it.

10 am came and went with no signs of any repair man coming. We inquired again, this time to be told that apparently the problem was on ‘our side of the meter’ and we would need to get our own electrician to repair the problem.

All the while we have a battery backup systems that powers our internet and wireless network connections, which are shared with our office in the same building, were beginning to shut down due to how long it had been running on its batteries. I had to do something fast. I had already physically exchanged two of the battery packs and was running out of fully charged batteries to replace them with.

I sent one of our guys to the electrical shop for 20 meters of heavy duty wire and two plugs for the ends of that, and quickly made an extension cord. I dropped that extension cord out the window of our flat and then went down to our friends flat downstairs and pulled the cord into her place. She had power and I had a key, so I decided that we needed to ‘borrow’ some power for a while to keep our network running.

After all this running around we finally had power back to the network. Crisis averted. At least the guys in the office could keep working.

Now on to the main power problem. Turns out that two of three main leads coming from the panel downstairs has shorted together, and burned. That meant replacing the three main circuit breakers plus some lengths of wire used to connect them to the rest of the system.

By 1:30 pm we had power back to our house. I double-checked to be sure that everything was indeed working. At one point we had every single electrical device in our house running all at once just to be sure.

My biggest frustration in all of this is that if they had told us at 1 am that we would not be getting power back until at least mid-morning we could have gone down to the guest house flat we have in this building and slept in air-conditioned peace. But instead we lay there all night sweating and swatting mosquitoes. I feel bad for my wife who has yet to get more than about 3 hours of sleep on any given night since we returned home. Hopefully she gets some good sleep tonight.