Over the weekend, DH & I cleaned up the garden & under our house. Yesterday we spent all afternoon finishing cleaning under the house. The kids helped in the way that they do best (by 'rearranging' all the stuff you just tidied).
After a very VERY dusty, dirty day, we headed upstairs to clean off & get some dinner. Dinner a la Macca's. By the time we got the kids to bed it was late. I then had to hang several loads of washing that I hadn't been able to do all day because of being so dirty. I started ironing about 9:30ish & at 11:00pm was still going but only had a few things left.
Just then a very loud army helicopter flew over & all of a sudden at 11:00pm our power went out.
Not the streetlights.
Not the neighbours power.
Just ours.
Our circuit breaker has been tripping a lot lately (we have 2 main circuit breakers & we found the entire house except for little bear's room & one power point are connected to one of them. This includes the washing machine & pool pump downstairs. What genius thought that was a good idea?!?)
Anyway, we knew it wasn't the circuit breaker, as the whole house was down. DH checked the safety switch but it wasn't that either. We called Ergon & were advised that if it was our problem we would have to pay a $340 callout fee. Unfortunately you don't know if it's your problem until you call them out to check!
Anyway, it seemed likely it was an Ergon thing & so we got them out. They turned up sometime after midnight (after going up & down the street in the cherry picker several times), turned on all their floodlights & aimed them at our house (just so the neighbours know who to blame for keeping them awake on Sunday night Monday morning.
A few months ago Ergon replaced the cable from the power pole to the house, but they didn't replace the bits that join the wire to the house. That was the problem & at 1:00am this morning we got a new one of those too. They didn't need the cherry picker after all that, but they did check our connection to the power pole too, just to be sure - seeing as they had the CP there, I guess it seemed a shame not to use it.
This is kind of getting old hat for us now.
At our last place (a rental thank goodness), the power went out one day & I smelt burning electrics. After 'smelling' around the house for a bit (a couple of minutes), I went downstairs to check the meter box (located in the centre of the house right under the upstairs (wooden) floorboards.
It was on fire, but it extinguished as I watched it. Phew.
Anyways, contacted the owner who corrected that problem for us. That night or shortly thereafter, we turned off all our electrical appliances to go to bed (at about 11:00pm) and suddenly the power went out again. Another call to the owner (who worked for Ergon) & Ergon was out in the middle of the night fixing the fuse (sans Cherry Picker). When they do this without a cherry picker, they have a very long pole they use to manover the fuse into position in the box (which is at the top of a power pole). Issue seemed to be fixed.
A couple of days later, again at about 11:00pm we turn off our appliances & again the same thing happens. By now we know the drill. Ergon comes out with Cherry Picker this time. Turned out they needed the fuse to be between 2 posts, but it was jammed in beside one of the posts, instead of between them. When all the power was on, the current was pulling the two posts together enough that electricity was able to flow. As soon as we turned off all our stuff, ka-boom, blew another fuse.
Somewhere in all of this, we spent 3 days without power, running our fridge & a single portable fan from extension leads attached to our very generous neighbour's power supply in the middle of a North Qld summer. Not pleasant.
On another note, the washing machine guy was out today. He'll fix the latch on Wednesday (hopefully) & then look at the hole in the outer casing of the drum (not sure what it's called) which we found when we removed the lid to release the catch to get the washing out. Could be why my "Ultrasilencer" is not ultra silent!
