Power Cut Friday

Of course this might not be what caused it

First thing that happened was that the shower failed. It was producing nothing more than a low buzzing sound. Not what you want if you are stood naked underneath it. I’ve had this happen before. The usual solution is to fit a new shower (after you have got dressed). I’ve done this several times over the years. Once with jetlag. But I was hoping for a bunged up filter. I took the shower to bits and I was just removing the filter cover when the 3D printer stopped with an alarm. And wouldn’t power on again. I was just wondering what the third thing was going to be (problems like this always come in threes) when when the washing machine flashed up a fault code.

Then everything went off and I relaxed. It must be a power thing. I put the shower back together. And then the mobile phone signal vanished. I was expecting that important things like cellular networks to have some kind of battery backup, but apparently not. That was kind of worrying. We were completely out of contact with the rest of the world. This is how we must have felt in the seventies. Except that in the seventies our landline phones still worked.

The power came back after about twenty minutes. We did eventually get a text telling us that the power had gone off (in case anyone hadn’t noticed) but that was all. I reckon that for about twenty minutes before the power failed we had been running on a low mains voltage. Anything using a “switched mode” power supply would have kept working. But anything with a motor in it would be suffering. So computers and screens all worked fine. Showers not so much.

I always thought that the power companies tried very hard to provide either 250 volts or nothing, but it turns out that this is not the case. The good news is that everything has come back fine and so all we had to do was reset a few clocks and throw away a half completed 3D print.

A few weeks ago the UK had a test of an “emergency broadcast” thing where most people’s phones buzzed with the message “Do not worry. This is a test”. This made us all feel much safer (except of course for those who didn’t get the message). However, if It turns out that at the first hint of trouble our phones are all going to be disconnected it makes all that effort seem like a bit of a waste of time.