Power Outage

We woke up today to the most annoying noise that you want to hear at 4:00am. Worst yet we had no idea what the noise was, where it was coming from or why it was happening in the first place.

Jumped Out Of Bed

The second we jumped out of bed we knew that something was going on, the house was freezing cold and as we flicked the light switch in the hallway it was apparent what was up. The electricity was out.

Crap, was it only us and I needed to reset a breaker? Possibly it was only our street or neighborhood? Jumping online and heading to the power companies website, plugging in our address and waiting a few minutes ended up telling us that we were one of 132 to 136 homes in  the area without power due to an equipment malfunction, fun!

Diving in a little deeper still we learned found the estimated time of completion to be 9:00am. This was 5 hours away, holy crap is it going to be cold in here by the time we wake up and have to get out of bed to get ready for work.

Getting Ready

So for the most part we did everything as though we were out in the hills camping and somewhat roughing it. I boiled water for my coffee system, used the extra water along with hot tap water to warm Zoey's bottle I had just taken from the fridge, putting a towel over the container to retain as much heat as possible.

Another thing I did to conserve energy was to think about exactly what I needed from the fridge before opening it. This way I would preserve as much of the cool temperatures as possible. Same thing when I put everything back into the fridge. Opened the door one time, put in the coffee creamer, the dog food, juice bottle and I think that was it.

Thankfully we have a gas stove so I was able to cook and heat things. The only catch was the sparked thing did not work so I had to do that manually using a lighter which was no big deal at all. Had we had only electric appliances then we would have been shxt out of luck.

I suppose I had a few other options. I do have a kick ass Honda generator that I could have fired up outside, ran a long extension cord into the house and ran a heater for Zoey and Cicely. Had we been home for the day or if it were any colder it would have been 100% necessary I think to do so.

Nine Thirty Seven

The power never came on at 9:00am as expected, but it did pop on at just a tad past half the hour at 9:37am. I immediately looked at our Nest thermostat and it read a toasty 56° in the house - brr!

The lights, appliances like the microwave, stove light, computer equipment and so on came back to life and things were back to normal in a blink of an eye, well other than all of us other than Zoe and Oggy - so Cicely and I, we're freezing cold and loving the warm heat pumping out the vents!

I don't care much for fake heat like that, if that makes sense to you what I mean. I prefer the heat of the sun on my face rather than hot air pumping at my face, during my lips and eyes! In this case though it was a welcomed thing and felt great after being so cold all morning.

Thaw Out

That's about it for today's excitement and news. I hope that we don't have to deal with that sort of thing for a long time. Usually the power company here NVEnergy is great about getting power restored in minutes, maybe 1/2 hour. My guess is that this equipment failure was a much bigger beast than anticipated.

All said and done it was in fact fixed and only a hair after the time the estimated it to be completed, not bad at all! Thanks for your hard work guys!

Photo: That's right, I am actually boiling water on the stove to make my coffee this morning. No power so my kettle gets the day off.