Your Survival Blog
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
What to know before the power goes out
This fall I was sitting around the house of a pleasant Wednesday morning, happily pounding away on my laptop, conversing with friends in one window, Accomplishing Stuff. Then ... buzz, crackle, the lights all flashed and went out. And came back. And with a final sigh, went out again.
There was something in the finality of that sequence that made me suspect the power would be out for a while. When I stuck my head out and called to a neighbor a couple of doors down, only to discover her power was out too, I figured we were in for the long haul — and me still unshowered. (My water usually works during outages, but my water heater doesn’t. And I like long showers.)
So I was back to the dance I’d done in another town many a time: first try to guess how long the power would be out, and then figure out what to do during the outage. As I tried to reach neighbors to see how far the blackout extended (several have VoIP so their house phones no longer worked), one stuck her head in and told me the school, two miles away, was also out. I called the electric company and wandered through a voicemail maze, reaching a human. A substation by the nearest shopping mall had gone down, he told me, and their best estimate was two hours hence.
Just as I hung up, preparing to go door-to-door spreading the news, I noticed a light had come back on — the power smoothly returned as though it had never left. And though I hadn’t unplugged them yet in preparation for the power coming back, none of the electronics in the house had been fried.
The previous outage wasn’t so smooth. We were watching a DVD late at night, when lightning struck overhead (the single loudest sound I have heard in my lifetime!). The power wasn’t out for very long, but when it returned, we’d sacrificed several items to the lightning gods: an Internet router and cable modem (which took four days to replace — an eternity for a work-at-home household); one landline phone; and the contents of our basement freezer. The freezer itself actually survived, but the surge tripped the GFCI circuit it was plugged into, and by the time we tracked down the problem we had to discard hundreds of dollars’ worth of food.
As for the phone ... the phone company informed me their network was just fine, and suggested I check the “Network Interface Device” (NID) which, they said, could be anywhere in our basement or outside. (I eventually found it in our bike shed.) I borrowed a working phone, plugged it in, and got a dial tone from the NID, proving the problem was in my house. After much trial and error inside, I unplugged our answering machine, plugged in a borrowed working phone, and got a dial tone: the phone line was fine but the answering machine was fried, and while it was plugged in to a phone jack, no other handsets would function. Removing it solved the problem.
So let’s review some lessons learned:
1. Know your circuit breakers. Know where the breaker panel is. Know which outlets and devices each breaker controls. Know how to reset a breaker. Make sure they’re correctly labeled.
If an appliance won’t come on, don’t just check the circuit breaker. Check to see if it’s plugged into a GFCI outlet, and if the circuit breaker in the outlet has been tripped. If it’s a large appliance, check the manual to see if it has a built-in fuse that might have blown.
2. Protect yourself from surges. Don’t hesitate to splurge on a high-quality surge protector for your most critical devices. Do unplug voltage-sensitive equipment (especially computers) during an outage, to avoid surges from the return of power damaging your electronics.
3. Learn about your phone service. If you have Plain Old Telephone Service, have a basic idea how to debug it. Have a spare working phone on hand, and know where the Network Interface Device to your home is.
4. Be prepared to swap a lot of devices around to track down a problem.
In another column, we’ll cover “now what?”: what to do, and have on hand, during the actual outage.
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