Powerless Blessing

We live in a development where all the houses have electricity delivered via underground lines. The entire neighborhood is fed by a single pole. If that pole goes out, every house is hit. Some of our neighbors have whole home generators, we do not.

This past Saturday, at 4:58am, our power went out. It was 17 degrees out with a wind chill of 11. The indoor temperature starting dropping steadily (no surprise). We live on a small man-made lake (technically a large pond), and the homes on the other side of the pond (a different development) all seemed to have their power on.

I’m a home automation nut. I have many Z-Wave light switches. When we lose power, which happens more frequently than I would like (but rarely lasts too long), I sometimes “lose” a switch to some kind of burnout. When that happens, it’s mildly annoying. Not just the cost of replacing the switch, but turning off power (via a breaker) and replacing it. Some rooms are more painful to work on due to everything else that might get turned off when the breaker gets switched off (e.g., the main Internet router). So, sometimes, I procrastinate replacing bad switches.

Going into Saturday, I had five switches that needed to be replaced. I had the replacements already, but they were just sitting and mocking me for weeks (in a couple of cases, months!). As badly as I didn’t want to work on this while the power was out and it was getting very cold in the house, it seemed like a very serendipitous opportunity. I threw off the breakers for the rooms that I was going to work in, just in case the power came on while I had wires in my hand.

I then proceeded to replace all five switches rather efficiently, wearing a headlamp to see what I was doing. I couldn’t test the result (no power), but it turned out that four of the switches worked perfectly, and one needed a little tender loving care (I reversed two wires, oops) and then it worked too.

Moving on…

Our very good friends live in the neighborhood across the pond (with the power on), and they were away taking care of their grandchildren. We were going over there every day to bring in their mail, packages and newspapers. We had to do that Saturday morning as well, so we brought our phones, chargers, a kindle and smart watch to charge up.

While we were there, my phone rang. It was our friend who was away. He said that a neighbor of his just called him. Before he finished the sentence, I assumed the rest would be “to tell me that someone is walking around in my house…”. But no, the neighbor called him to say that one of his front-yard irrigation pipes froze and burst and was spewing water all over. My friend asked if I would mind going over to the house to check on it and shut it off at the main valve. I told him that I was there already (and why).

I went outside (in what now had warmed up to 20 degrees!) and tried to find the valve while he talked me through it (unsuccessfully). I went back in the house and shut off the main water valve for the entire house. I looked from the front door and thought that also shut off the irrigation system (it didn’t!).

Now that we thought things were calm (they weren’t), I talked my friend through downloading/installing Google Meet (the old Google Duo), since I have an Android phone and he has an iPhone, so I couldn’t do “Facetime”. We got connected on Google Meet, and I went back outside. I immediately saw that the water was still pouring out.

Now that we had a video connection, I turned my phone away from me and he guided me to the box in the ground with the shut-off valve. It took a while to find the actual valve, but I was finally able to shut it off. Then I went back inside and turned on the main water supply for the house. After that, all that was left to do was to thoroughly clean the one earbud that fell in the mud while I was trying to stop the gushing water…

At this point, I got an alert from my home automation system that the power had come back on in our house. Yippee! We were scheduled to have lunch with our goddaughter and her family, but we had enough time to head home and check on things first. When we got there, the power was out again. My assumption was that they patched it temporarily to make sure that the power would flow, and when it did, they purposely disconnected it to make a more permanent fix.

So, we headed out to pick up Indian food to bring to our goddaughter’s house.

We had a great meal and fun time with the family. After eating, I got busy working on five different old(er) laptops that her family was planning to either recycle or give away. We tested each one, determined their quality and performance, and proceeded to wipe them back to the equivalent of a factory reset. One of the five was high-end enough for her to keep for the kids to use.

One was ancient and under-powered and was headed for full recycle (it would be criminal to give to someone). I took the other three with me to find new homes.

The next day I was scheduled to help a young couple with their taxes. They’re engaged now. This is the third year in a row that I have helped the woman file her taxes, and the second year that I’ve helped the man. Last year, we did both of their taxes on their one shared laptop. It was a beautiful looking machine that was woefully under-powered. It took forever for various pages to load. This year, it was in such bad shape that they told me in advance that they wouldn’t be bringing it. Since we used the web-based version of the tax software, we agreed to use my Chromebook.

That agreement happened before the laptop recovery project at my goddaughter’s the day before. When the couple arrived at our house, I broke out the best of the three laptops. We did both of their returns on that machine. When we were done, I gave the laptop to the woman. She tried to refuse, but I explained that my goddaughter asked me to find it a good home, so I twisted her arm gently and she took it.

I had to twist the man’s arm harder to take one of the other two (the next best of the three), but finally he relented. He argued that if I couldn’t find another home for it in a  few weeks or months, he’d take it. I argued that if he didn’t use it in the next few weeks or months, I’d take it back. I won.

Finally, back to the title of this post. What started out as a loss of power, ended up having a few blessings in disguise:

1. Replacing switches I had been procrastinating on for quite a while.
2. Being at my friend’s house to (eventually) shut off the irrigation leak.
3. Being at my goddaughter’s to salvage some old laptops.
4. Being able to give two of them away to two very wonderful young people.

The only thing that didn’t go well was that I lost one other switch during the power off, power on, power off shenanigans. I’ve ordered some new switches so that I can replace it, and have a few spares laying around for the inevitable next burnout.

On Sunday morning, we found out that we were the only neighborhood to lose power. Our feeder pole was hit by a car. Lovely. I hope the driver (and anyone else in the vicinity) is totally fine!