The house was dark when I came in tonight, but that was no surprise since Thor was out working. I turn on the kitchen light, and nothing happens. Maybe I flipped the wrong switch? I’m still not used to even having light switches that turn things on. Nope, the other switch doesn’t work either. Now I start to worry. I walk through the house trying to turn on every thing I can, and each time am met with the same result: nothing. There is no power anywhere to anything, and the house is incredibly cold.
This is more than a blown fuse. Did we even have fuses any more? I call Thor, and he has no idea, but suggests maybe ComEd came and switched our service. I go outside, and sure enough, the meter had been removed and the original power lines that fed into the house had been cut.
We were pretty hesitant to try and turn the new electrical panel on ourselves. We vaguely recalled being warned about messing with “something” that if touched could basically blow the house up. So what followed was a series of phone tag between myself, Thor, Matt, the head electrician, and then the guy who has been working on our house, and a few frantic calls to the power company’s various voice mails. The result was me sitting in the dark and cold in-between running out to the car to keep my phone charged up wondering why in the hell the electric company hadn’t let us know that they were going to switch our power.
The electrician finally showed up (he had been dragged from his sick bed by his boss), it turned out to be a pretty simple matter of first checking to make sure the connection to the old box was off so the house didn’t blow up. Then as he flipped the on switch to the new panel I could hear the furnace rumble to life, and the rest of the house turn itself back on.
Tags: Add new tag, cold, dark, electrical, electrical panel, electrician, furnace, fuse