Tuesday, February 04, 2020

Life is no picnic

At least not during the winter. The electrician that Ken called arrived last evening as promised and we explained what had happened. He inspected the problem circuit from the breaker box to a junction box to the single outlet on that line (no signs of water or humidity) and tested it. Everything tested fine and he restored power to the circuit. It all worked normally. So, we don't know why the circuit tripped the house's main breaker at 03h30 yesterday morning. He told us that electricity is funny like that. That's why he gets paid the big bucks, I suppose.

A lonely picnic table on the riverbank.

Another funny thing happened when we turned the power back on yesterday morning. Remember, that's when we were up in the dark trying to figure out what happened. I turned all the circuit breakers off and then back on, one by one, until I found the problem circuit. So that one stayed off and all the others worked normally. When I got the power back on in the rest of the house, the lights in the fan unit of the kitchen stove hood came on. And they wouldn't go off. We finally took the filters out of the hood and unplugged the wires that provide power to the lights.

We've been having problems with that hood for years since it was installed in 2007. It's always been hard to turn the lights on and off, and the hood fan controls didn't work any better. The electrician said that a power surge probably fried the hood's control panel as the house's main breaker tripped. So we asked the electrician to find us a replacement and install it. He agreed.

4 comments:

  1. Water and electricity, both a real pain but we can't live without them. Still, fixing the problems keeps people in a job!
    You'll probably find a new cooker hood so much better than the old one.

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  2. If you call an electrician here, he will probably tell you he’ll see you next week. You have a good one!

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  3. Yes, BettyAnn, I agree you were lucky to receive such a quick response. It seems service people are not hasty in responding to calls around here. In Wisconsin, we had been advised when we were planning the building of a home to have installed a whole-house surge protector as in Wisconsin (compared to Oregon) there are frequent weather emergencies that can really play havoc with electricity. I cannot remember if we chose to do that or not... memory goes, you know as one gets older. I think a complete house rewire would be very expensive. My father told me the electricians wrap a new wire onto the old wire at the breaker box and then go to each outlet and pull the new wire through. Or maybe in reverse. I cannot imagine either working smoothly. I had assumed a rewire would entail a lot of sheetrock replacement.
    Little did I know but now I do.

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  4. So you get a new stove hood, and something good has come from the mysterious power outage. Very good.

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