Wow, what a rough night we had on Wednesday.
At around 1:30am all of a sudden the fan turns off in our room. I looked at the clock and it was off. So, I got up to look around and noticed then that the power seemed to be coming back on and going back off. And in some parts of the house, the power was totally off and in others it seemed to to be on. I went to the kitchen and the refrigerator was acting like it was possessed. It was flashing a light from the ice maker and it sure looked weird. We checked the neighboring houses outside and it looked like everyone else still had lights so we were disappointed to realize that it was probably a problem at just our house. We walked around the house and were mystified as to why some lights were working and some weren't. Guillermo decided to go into the garage to check if a plug in there had been set off. Oh yes, we forgot about the alarm. As soon as he opened the garage door, the alarm went off. So, there we go again. Scrambling to call the monitoring company. After all that was taken care of, Guillermo walks in the hallway and says that he smells something burning, like an electric smell. I didn't smell anything and I walk back to the front of the house and was SHOCKED to see flashing lights out the front door. It was a fire truck!! I was like, "Wow, how did they know we were having problems???" So, I go outside to meet them, but instead all the firefighters start walking away from me, heading to the neighbor's house!! I was so confused and wondered why they were going over there! Turns out that the NEIGHBOR'S alarm had gone off and triggered a visit from the fire department. Then our neighbors told us that they were also having electrical issues. So, at least one other person on the block besides us.
After the firefighters found that there was no emergency at our neighbors house, they talked with us for a while. They also came into our house because by then we definitely could smell an electrical burning smell in the hallway. They went up into the attic to look around and found nothing wrong. They said that there was probably an issue with an outside box that feeds electricity to both our houses, that maybe some wires had burned out there and we were smelling that. So, they called CPS for us. CPS came out to our house twice, once at around 3am and again at around 4:30am. It was rough. We couldn't sleep at all because sometimes the power would come back on, and then it would go off again. And usually when it DID come on, it seemed to be at half power. We did turn off most things after a while because it was just too annoying to deal with the constant on and off. And we kept worrying about where that burning smell came from even though it didn't seem to be getting any worse, so that was good.
I was so glad to see it finally start to get light outside. And to be able to open windows to the house since we weren't using any fans or the AC because the power seemed so unstable. CPS came at around 8am with about 4 big trucks and first thing they wanted to know was where the "box" was. We knew nothing about any box, we thought all our power came from the pole. So, they dug around actually in our neighbor's back yard and found the box in the corner of their yard. So, we learned that we share a "box" with our neighbor! Which explains why they also were having problems.
Anyway, CPS set up a temporary alternate line from the pole to that box and now they need to come back and repair the "real" line that is somewhere in our yard. They'll dig around for that line sometime in the next few weeks. Once they got the temporary line set up and we had power again, the only thing we found to be not functioning anymore was the modem, so that had to be replaced.
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