The New Year's First Disaster
Jan. 3rd, 2021 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aOK, it was only a minor disaster, but the new year started off with a bang.
(Actually it started off with obsessive and mostly illegal bangs, which began around 6pm in the old year, and continued past midnight. In fact the disaster started in the old year, our old friend 2020, too.)
I came home from a walk out to Mahaulepu on New Year's Eve and the lights at home were flickering and dimming. They got worse after I prepared dinner and we sat down to eat while (finally) watching The Rise of Skywalker. The TV turned off 3 or 4 times during the movie. The lights dropped out a similar amount of times.
I looked at our Tesla app, and it told us that there'd been six blackouts that day. I figured that's what we were seeing, and I was annoyed that our solar power system wasn't dealing with them, because we were supposed to see brownouts as little flickers, nothing more.
Next morning, the lights were still dim when I turned some of them on. So I dropped a line to our solar engineer. Despite being New Year's Day he responded quickly and told me he'd filed a service ticket and asked them to look at it.
I waited all day: no response.
(Why do these problems always happen at the start of holiday weekends!?)
When I walked with my dad that evening, he said that it was probably the voltage fluctuating, that I could check that by looking at my UPS, and that if it was running low that could damage appliances.
And after I got home, things were even worse. We tried to watch TV that evening, and it was turning off every minute or two. We eventually ate without entertainment, and then Kimberly and I huddled in the living room all night under a flickering light.
When I went downstairs to look at the voltage on my UPS, it was running 100-110V, which is out of spec. (Research on line also agreed that motor-driven appliances like refrigerators can indeed be damaged because low voltage means high amperage, but that newer ones are better at watching for their motors being overheated.) Afterward, I started unplugging things. But I couldn't unplug our two main motor-driven appliances (the refrigerator and chest freezer).
Oh, and we learned that our house could no longer really support power for two rooms at a time: when I was downstairs working with the UPS, the power problems had gotten worse upstairs.
The next day I mailed our solar people again to let them know that I hadn't heard from anyone the previous day and that the problems were getting worse. I let it sit until lunch time, and then I started get contacts from folks at the company.
Within a few hours, the problem had worked its way through the entire solar-service infrastructure and then out to Tesla, and we learned that we were getting bad voltage from our utility company!!? Our engineer said he'd never seen anything like it; my other main contact said they'd seen one other situation like this recently.
My best guess here: the power outages had preceded the voltage problems and had somehow knocked something out of kilter.
I'm often paranoid about calling people about a problem unnecessarily. I'll double and triple check something is really a problem before I start asking for help. And I make darned sure that I'm talking to the right people.
But this time, I had no qualms over having dumped it on Rising Sun Solar. I mean, they basically rebuilt our electricity system, and they were the one who could actually assess where the problem was. (Big plus that I stayed super friendly the whole time, though, never even hinting at my frustration.) So I felt entirely proper having contacted them, even when the problem got punted to KIUC.
KIUC took my report and dispatched a technician almost immediately, despite it now being the Saturday after New Year's. He was here and gone within an hour, and I wouldn't have even known he was here if I hadn't chanced to see him outside and grabbed him (well, from 20 feet away) to verify the problem was solved.
It was.
(No explanation though.)
Which isn't to say there weren't repercussions.
First, a few hours later, I discovered our oven making weird churning sounds ... and the door was locked! That was just before my dad came over for swimming that evening. I hadn't even been able to figure out how to turn the darned thing off, but he pointed toward the circuit breakers. Aha! I turned it off, and that stopped the churning. Turning on the cleaning cycle, and then canceling it then got the oven door unlocked. As best I can guess, it was in some type of infinite locking cycle, probably due to the uneven voltage.
Second, a brand-new LED light bulb blew out during the uneven voltage. That doesn't make me feel great about what else might have been damaged, but most important things were behind surge protectors, and I also had unplugged a lot when I'd verified the voltage issue. (Thankfully, it wasn't a smart light; I've wanted those since we started smartifying our house in Berkeley, but our first actually smart bulbs arrive in a week.)
Third, a GFCI plug in the garage got reset. I hate those things; maybe they'll stop me from being electrocuted some day, but in the meantime, they've caused me problems at least a dozen times over the years. And I don't even understand why that plug in the garage is GFCI, because the next one over isn't. Oh, and it's the plug with our new chest freezer on it. My dad and I had actually checked the freezer the other day, and it seemed cool. But it might have been defrosting even then. By the time I found it, it'd been off for at least 20 hours, but maybe as much as 72. Joy. Everything was entirely defrosted, though the stuff at the bottom was still somewhat cool. I doubtless could have saved some of it, especially the stuff frozen from the refrigerator like lunch meat and cheese, but I didn't feel like starting off the new year with a game of Frozen Roulette. So I threw out a few hundred dollars worth of food from our newly stocked newly purchased chest freezer.
So, hello 2021. But maybe we can blame this all on 2020's last gasp. Maybe? Please.
Today was my first day back to work. Well, I did yard work, including the much-hated hill. (I found the defrosted freezer when I realized my tool batteries weren't recharging.) My buddy, the Cattle Egret joined me again. Kimberly says his name is Egor.
And tomorrow I head back to the office. Well, my office, downstairs. I've actually done a great job of having 10 days or so of downtime, not continuing my work obsessively into the evening like I tend to. That'd be a good pattern to stick with, but we'll see how it goes. I really like the creative work I'm doing, so it's hard to hold it back into just my creative workdays. (Especially since I only have at best, three of those a week.)
(Actually it started off with obsessive and mostly illegal bangs, which began around 6pm in the old year, and continued past midnight. In fact the disaster started in the old year, our old friend 2020, too.)
I came home from a walk out to Mahaulepu on New Year's Eve and the lights at home were flickering and dimming. They got worse after I prepared dinner and we sat down to eat while (finally) watching The Rise of Skywalker. The TV turned off 3 or 4 times during the movie. The lights dropped out a similar amount of times.
I looked at our Tesla app, and it told us that there'd been six blackouts that day. I figured that's what we were seeing, and I was annoyed that our solar power system wasn't dealing with them, because we were supposed to see brownouts as little flickers, nothing more.
Next morning, the lights were still dim when I turned some of them on. So I dropped a line to our solar engineer. Despite being New Year's Day he responded quickly and told me he'd filed a service ticket and asked them to look at it.
I waited all day: no response.
(Why do these problems always happen at the start of holiday weekends!?)
When I walked with my dad that evening, he said that it was probably the voltage fluctuating, that I could check that by looking at my UPS, and that if it was running low that could damage appliances.
And after I got home, things were even worse. We tried to watch TV that evening, and it was turning off every minute or two. We eventually ate without entertainment, and then Kimberly and I huddled in the living room all night under a flickering light.
When I went downstairs to look at the voltage on my UPS, it was running 100-110V, which is out of spec. (Research on line also agreed that motor-driven appliances like refrigerators can indeed be damaged because low voltage means high amperage, but that newer ones are better at watching for their motors being overheated.) Afterward, I started unplugging things. But I couldn't unplug our two main motor-driven appliances (the refrigerator and chest freezer).
Oh, and we learned that our house could no longer really support power for two rooms at a time: when I was downstairs working with the UPS, the power problems had gotten worse upstairs.
The next day I mailed our solar people again to let them know that I hadn't heard from anyone the previous day and that the problems were getting worse. I let it sit until lunch time, and then I started get contacts from folks at the company.
Within a few hours, the problem had worked its way through the entire solar-service infrastructure and then out to Tesla, and we learned that we were getting bad voltage from our utility company!!? Our engineer said he'd never seen anything like it; my other main contact said they'd seen one other situation like this recently.
My best guess here: the power outages had preceded the voltage problems and had somehow knocked something out of kilter.
I'm often paranoid about calling people about a problem unnecessarily. I'll double and triple check something is really a problem before I start asking for help. And I make darned sure that I'm talking to the right people.
But this time, I had no qualms over having dumped it on Rising Sun Solar. I mean, they basically rebuilt our electricity system, and they were the one who could actually assess where the problem was. (Big plus that I stayed super friendly the whole time, though, never even hinting at my frustration.) So I felt entirely proper having contacted them, even when the problem got punted to KIUC.
KIUC took my report and dispatched a technician almost immediately, despite it now being the Saturday after New Year's. He was here and gone within an hour, and I wouldn't have even known he was here if I hadn't chanced to see him outside and grabbed him (well, from 20 feet away) to verify the problem was solved.
It was.
(No explanation though.)
Which isn't to say there weren't repercussions.
First, a few hours later, I discovered our oven making weird churning sounds ... and the door was locked! That was just before my dad came over for swimming that evening. I hadn't even been able to figure out how to turn the darned thing off, but he pointed toward the circuit breakers. Aha! I turned it off, and that stopped the churning. Turning on the cleaning cycle, and then canceling it then got the oven door unlocked. As best I can guess, it was in some type of infinite locking cycle, probably due to the uneven voltage.
Second, a brand-new LED light bulb blew out during the uneven voltage. That doesn't make me feel great about what else might have been damaged, but most important things were behind surge protectors, and I also had unplugged a lot when I'd verified the voltage issue. (Thankfully, it wasn't a smart light; I've wanted those since we started smartifying our house in Berkeley, but our first actually smart bulbs arrive in a week.)
Third, a GFCI plug in the garage got reset. I hate those things; maybe they'll stop me from being electrocuted some day, but in the meantime, they've caused me problems at least a dozen times over the years. And I don't even understand why that plug in the garage is GFCI, because the next one over isn't. Oh, and it's the plug with our new chest freezer on it. My dad and I had actually checked the freezer the other day, and it seemed cool. But it might have been defrosting even then. By the time I found it, it'd been off for at least 20 hours, but maybe as much as 72. Joy. Everything was entirely defrosted, though the stuff at the bottom was still somewhat cool. I doubtless could have saved some of it, especially the stuff frozen from the refrigerator like lunch meat and cheese, but I didn't feel like starting off the new year with a game of Frozen Roulette. So I threw out a few hundred dollars worth of food from our newly stocked newly purchased chest freezer.
So, hello 2021. But maybe we can blame this all on 2020's last gasp. Maybe? Please.
Today was my first day back to work. Well, I did yard work, including the much-hated hill. (I found the defrosted freezer when I realized my tool batteries weren't recharging.) My buddy, the Cattle Egret joined me again. Kimberly says his name is Egor.
And tomorrow I head back to the office. Well, my office, downstairs. I've actually done a great job of having 10 days or so of downtime, not continuing my work obsessively into the evening like I tend to. That'd be a good pattern to stick with, but we'll see how it goes. I really like the creative work I'm doing, so it's hard to hold it back into just my creative workdays. (Especially since I only have at best, three of those a week.)