Third Night's A Charm - or Not

So for the third night in a row, we had a major issue with the house.

First it was the water heater (or so we thought), then we discovered the massive plumbing leak. Last night it was the electricity.

As we were getting ready for bed last night (and for those who know me, you'll know that was well into the wee hours of the morning) when the power went out. Living out here in the hinterlands, that's not an uncommon occurrence, but in the middle of summer -- even at 3 a.m. -- air conditioning is not something you want to be without for very long. The wind had started picking up right before we went to bed, and we figured that was probably the cause of our problem, so we called the power company to report the outage and went outside to investigate.

When the power goes out, we have a routine. First, we look around and see who else has lost power. If it's only our house, it's probably a fuse. If it's our house and a few other houses to the east, the problem is in the minor power line leading to our house, and as long as we report the outage they will probably fix it relatively quickly. If the whole Valley is dark, there's something seriously wrong and we could be out of power for a long, long time.

But at 3 a.m., it's hard to tell whether a house has no power or all the residents are simply more sane than I and have gone to bed for the night. We were able to see some outdoor lights on at a few houses to the east, however, and all the cities around seemed to be pretty bright, so we began to decide that the problem was just at our house -- more than likely a fuse.

So we went back to the fuse box, but none of the fuses had been tripped. (Meanwhile, the poor kitten trapped in our flooded crawlspace, near the fusebox, made sure we knew he was still there.) Back out to the front of the house, we looked at the power line leading in to the house, we looked at the transformer box, and nothing looked out of place. We watched the roads to see when the power company might be coming out to fix the problem (it's amazing how many people are on the road at 3 a.m.).

Finally we decided to test the water pump. Turn the hose on and if the pump has no power we would lose pressure pretty quickly. But no, the water pump kicked right on. Then we knew the problem was at our house. We kept asking ourselves what the problem could be. We paid the bill... We checked the fuses... Oh, wait! The house and the pumphouse are on two different sets of fuses. We only checked the house fuses, we didn't check the main property fuses!

Sure enough, with a flip of a switch all our power was restored, and we could go to bed in air conditioned comfort, pleased that this problem was simple and relatively easy to fix.

And the power company? We tried calling them back to let them know our problem had been fixed, but we lost cell reception (we don't own a landline phone), so we couldn't get ahold of them. About an hour later, we heard the truck outside and my husband went out, told them our power was back on and thanked them for a job well done.