Thursday, July 21, 2016

A Little Excitement

What started out as a quiet day, ended with a little excitement. It was around 5:00 and I had just finished scooping the cat box in the laundry room. Jeff was sitting at the counter in the kitchen checking e-mail. The lights over the counter flickered, went out, then came on. It happened quickly and I told Jeff that I heard an "electrical" buzzing noise and it sounded like it came from outside. Since the electrical panel is in the laundry room, Jeff feared it came from there. After inspecting the panel it seemed fine. We then realized that the A/C wasn't running. When we looked at the thermostat, it was blank... no read out. Nothing we did could make it come on. We figured there was a power surge and that the thermostat was fried. Jeff put a call into our electrician for advice and went back to work. I decided to go outside and water plants and that's when I saw it...


A power line had snapped and was laying across our driveway!



I called the electric company to report it. The strange thing was that we still had electricity... just no A/C. I decided to message my brother, who is an electrician in New Hampshire. I sent him photos of the line and he thought maybe it was the 220 line that was down. He had me check if my cook top and oven were working... they were dead too. He told us to shut everything in the house off because it could be trying to pull in more amperage than was available (or something like that!). We shut everything off except the refrigerator. 



Around 7:30 the power company arrived at the same time our electrician called back. They both said flip the main and shut power off to the house! In no time at all the line was repaired and our 220 appliances were working. Luckily nothing was fried when the wire broke.

During the chaos of our electrical crisis, I never went out to bring the gallery "OPEN" flags in. Much to our delight, we had a customer come in at 7:00 pm. After wrapping his pots, Jeff directed him out of the driveway so that he wouldn't cross over the live wires. Thankfully he managed to avoid them coming in.

I am hoping that's all the excitement for the week. I will leave you with a couple of piggy banks that came out of the kiln last week. If you need a pig, I have quite a few in stock right now. Clicking on the photo takes you to the Etsy shop.


8 comments:

  1. yikes, 220 that is definitely dangerous and scary, when my kiln was taking forever to rise in temp I found out the transformer at our pole had a short, which meant every electrical appliance, stove, fridge, kiln, ac, wasn't getting the proper amount of power which in turn made them all fry up due to lack of power, the digital readout on my kiln alerted me to this otherwise I could have gone on for months with lack of power and appliances failing. I'd have the electric company check everything out.

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    1. The lineman that came out said the transformer is far from our house, since we are set back from the road. He said if we decided to wire our electric kiln we should have the power company move the transformer to the pole at the top of the driveway. Of course that will most likely involve another cost for us... I think we will continue to bisque fire in the gas kiln for a bit longer!

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  2. I'm glad your electrical adventure ended well, & that you got a sale out of it. I especially like the first pig!

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  3. It's always sumthin'! Very pleased that the problem was quickly found and solved.
    And you made a sale!

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  4. Whow, what an adventure with electricity! Glad it all came out ok.

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  5. Glad no damage done, power lines coming down are scary! We had two lines touch just outside our place one day, and I remember the electric fan heater suddenly starting to glow right through the plastic a second before a main fuse blew! Nice you got a customer because your signs stayed out!

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