In the past 3 weeks, we've had 3 power outages, all occurring at night or during the evening. So, today for a change, we had our outage during the day. And again, it was just our house. This is getting really old. Anyway, the repair crews found a "ground fault" in the underground line, dug up that spot, and repaired it.
But, given that the underground line is 30 years old, I'm starting a pool as to when the next outage will be........
Wednesday (07/28) was noteable for being the first Wednesday in 2 weeks for which we did not have a fairly long (6 hrs or so) power outage. So, I thought our streak of power issues had ended.
But, it was just a false sense of security, and we experienced another outage last night (even though there were no storms or other obvious causes).
The "good news" is that it wasn't just us - our neighbors were affected too. Now I know that sounds a bit odd. But, the last two outages affected only our house (which is the last house on the line), and its a long way between us and the neighbors. That leaves a lot of above ground and underground utility lines to have problems between us and the neighbors. (And the underground line is very old.) Having had 2 recent problems, I was beginning to worry that we needed some major maintenance done. So, I was a bit relieved to find out the problem wasn't just with our lines this time!
Hopefully, we're done with power outages for a while.
It was just a week ago where LCUB installed a new transformer at our house. Late yesterday afternoon, we had a pretty good thunderstorm come through the area with lots of wind, lightning, and even a little bit of hail. And, near the end our power got knocked out. Sure enough, it was just our house that was out.
The LCUB overhead line crew came out, and it turned out to be the same crew as last week. But, they couldn't find anything wrong with the overhead lines. So, they called in the “subsurface crew” and said it could be quite a while before we got power back. The “subsurface crew” worked several hours and couldn’t find any problems with the subsurface lines. So, they “re-powered” us, and the power stayed on. Their thoughts were that the overhead crew missed a branch or something. All I know is that we have power again (after 6 hours)! Let’s hope it’s the last time for a while.
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OK, I know that pictures of cows aren't really very interesting. But, what makes these cows unusual is that they are grazing on our front field. The past month or so has been quite dry locally. The grass has turned brown, tree's are looking very wilted, etc. The surrounding counties have all had rain, but it always has seemed to miss us.
Our neighbor runs cattle and he asked about using the front pasture to let his cattle have something to eat, since his fields were grazedd out. We agreed, so we've got cattle in the front pasture.
The good news is that we've finally had some rain, and things are greening up. Hopefully, the mini-drought is over.
The sunflower pictures are from our sunflower patch.
Yesterday was a perfectly ordinary day. The weather was sunny and nice, no thunderstorms whatsoever. So it was a bit surprising when our power went off at about 10:30 last night.
Maggie (the dog) didn’t much care for the situation. Although she’s not allowed in our bedroom, she took the sudden plunge into darkness as an excuse to “sneak” in and lay just inside the door. After a few minutes, she did the get up and turn around 3 times thing that dogs have to do, and moved in a few more feet.
At this point, I got a flashlight, found my reading glasses (as it’s impossible to read the phone book without them), and called LCUB. We’re the last house on the line and when power outages occur, we’ve always called LCUB, just to be sure that LCUB knows in case we’re the only house impacted. And that was the case last night – just our house was out!
After a while, LCUB called me back. It seems they were having trouble finding our house. They had chickened out before heading far enough down our road. I ended up going down to meet them to make sure they were in the right place.
Eventually, they checked the aboveground lines leading to our house and found nothing amiss. (The last bit of the power line runs underground). They then started to work on the transformer, which required multiple smacks with a sledge hammer to get it open. Which of course sent Maggie into a panic, what with their truck driving up, strange voices in the yard, flashlights waving around, and loud noises going on. It took them about 4 hours, but we’ve now got a nice, new shiny transformer and even more importantly, power (which translates to having AC and water).
For those paying attention, you’ll note that Jenn’s last blog post is from June 14. Never fear, although she has neglected to blog, we have heard from her occasionally, so we know she’s not been buried in an avalanche or other catastrophe. (I refer you back to Ignorance is Bliss and the Addendum for a more complete list of potential catastrophes…)
Part of the problem is lack of internet. Although they now have internet in their dorm, it’s hard to get on, and she mostly still has to get off the mountain to have good internet. Cell phone signals are also difficult. The weather has been great on the mountain, and the views fantastic (as viewed from the webcams), but the cell signals are poor, and it frequently takes many tries to have a cell phone conversation.
