Burn, baby, burn

First the fire, then the flood, and now things burning up – sort of.

We have had some power issues the last couple of days in our building. At first I thought one of our ACs had gone bad, so after some lugging and heavy lifting, and help from my wife in this process, we moved the office AC into the bedroom and vice versa. That was not the problem apparently.

Throughout that long and restless night of sleep with no AC, the power seemed to be going up and down, based on the random speed of the ceiling fan throughout the night.

We got up the next morning to find that the power was still not stable. After about an hour, the lights suddenly became much brighter very quickly. The Fridge door being opened nearly required sunglasses due to the glare of the light inside.

By then, the damage was done. There were no noticeable blasts, or pops, or puffs of smoke. Nothing to hint of the damage done. However, a surge of voltage well above our normal range had coursed through our building (we found out later apparently it was only in our building, and only in half the building since there are two main power panels).

Over the next several hours we began to notice several things not working the way they should. The fridge was the first casualty we noticed. The light was still on inside, but the compressor was no longer working, and things were beginning to get warmer in there. Not good.

Then we noticed the microwave, then the stereo, then the cable tv box, then the vcr, and the cordless phones, and so on. Ironically in two parts of the house, there were two power strips with multiple items plugged into them, where half the items blew and half were just fine. Odd to me that not everything blew that was in that same line.

So, we now begin the process of trying to repair what can be, and consider replacements for what is needed. By God’s grace our office and all of its computers was totally fine, including our own computers. We hope the fridge might be covered under warranty, but the other items we will have to pay for. Some might need to wait for a few months.

Thankfully we have a guest house just one floor down that is not housing anyone right now, so I carried that fridge up to our place last night to allow us to save most of the cold stuff. That will get us through until the fridge can be fixed. The microwave is the biggest loss right now.

More on this saga in the days to come.