We had a power outage this evening from 8:30 to 10:00 PM. Afterward our home fileserver did not boot, so personal email accounts and home phone are temporarily down. Hopefully I can get things straightened out Monday. The server issue is with the motherboard and/or (more likely) the power supply. The drives should be fine so I don’t expect any data loss.
The power failure took the opportunity to interrupt my breadmaking. I had kicked off a new flavor, Italian wheat, only to have the power pull the plug on it after 90 minutes. It was a short blip but enough to knock the breadmaker out of its cycle. Fortunately, I found another cycle that heads to the bake cycle relatively quickly and got it going again. Then the power failed again, this time for the 90 minute outage. I still would not give up on my bread, though, and resumed baking it after the power returned. Against all odds it turned out great!
While we were in the dark I decided to drive around the neighborhood and see if I could find out what was happening with the power. Usually there is a tree down or something obvious. However, there was little wind during tonight’s rain. It’s also been cool all day so there was not a huge demand for power, ruling out a transformer or demand issue. Some homes in East Mordecai were still lit as was the church next to my neighborhood.
I drove down Glascock to Wake Forest Road to see a Progress Energy truck slowly driving down the road, peering at poles. After watching him for a moment I drove back towards home. I opted to continue down Glascock to see how far the outage stretched. A cop in the Food Lion parking lot then told me it was a transformer that had “blown up” on Blount Street. This didn’t make sense to me as I hadn’t heard of any fire trucks or anything, but I drove over there anyway.
On Franklin Street between Blount and Person Streets I found the lineman in his truck again. He was looking at a large switch on a pole there and soon was moving up to it in a bucket. As the lineman hooked it with a fiberglass pole I saw the streetlights on Person street flicker to life. But Glascock was still dark as I drove home, so I figured the lineman had at least one more switch to throw before the power reached our home. Sure enough, the power returned to our home about 10 minutes after I returned.
I’m still not sure what caused the outage but it was nice to watch the rain in the dark for a while.