Actually the lights weren’t affected by the outage, but the central heating, the WiFi, the freezer and the fridge were in part or completely useless. It’s nice to have heat again!
The friend of a friend, Owen the Electrician arrived dead on 10am. He started by checking all the plug sockets beginning at roughly the middle of the ring main, which, coincidentally was where I thought the problem might be. We had to haul out the washing machine to get to the socket. There was a fault in it, but he also found a socket he though was dodgy and when he took off the cover to check, all the wires were loose inside. With that fixed, he started to systematically check round all the sockets on that ring main. Thankfully he didn’t find any other problem sockets, but was very careful to double, and even triple check all of them again. Finally after reassembling the one with the loose wires and checking it, he worked out how to deal with the socket behind the washing machine. To do that he neutralised the socket with a fancy little disconnector thing, then put a new cover plate over the now disconnected wires. Two hours he was at it and then he was off to pick up keys from somebody to start work tomorrow on an industrial unit.
For two days we’d been without heating and access to some of the electrical goods we take for granted. I’d managed to rig up an extension cable from the upstairs hall that wasn’t affected by the outage and used that to keep the freezer working. We also had a somewhat smelly De Longhi oil filled radiator that kept us from freezing. Blogs were posted using a hit and miss hot spot from my phone. We got by, but it wasn’t much fun.
We’ve agreed that we need a new distribution board, but the good news is that Owen says we don’t need the house rewired.
After the electrician left we had tea and toast for our lunch and watched the thermometer rising steadily. Later while Scamp put all the things back in place, I walked round St Mo’s and took today’s PoD which is a bunch of catkins. Then I walked down to the shops in the rain for a pizza and a trifle. That became dinner.
We watched the last ever Endeavour, and then discussed what had happened and how far back that story went.
Tomorrow I may go out with Val for coffee, because the rest of the week will tight.