Jeff Jett – LinkedIn
This morning was an adventure.
I had trouble sleeping last night, and so was up until about 2 a.m. or so. At around 5 a.m. our power started going off and coming back on again right away, over and over. We would just drop off to sleep again with a sigh and off again, on again. We finally gave up trying to sleep and got up for the day at 6. One of the reasons we were more awake that usual at that hour is that our generator is supposed to come on automatically when our power fails, and it didn’t.
I fed animals while my husband went out to look at the generator. By the time he came back in, I had lit a fire in the fireplace, because it was quite cool in the house by then (less than 20 degrees F. outside) and the generator does not run our heat or air conditioning, managing to serve hot drinks and a bagel with cream cheese. My husband had tried to jump start the battery on the generator with our truck and the jumper cables, but that didn’t work, either.
We had to wait another hour or so for O’Reilly’s, the car place, to open. I went around finding battery-powered lanterns while my husband went to buy a new battery for the generator. We installed it and got the generator going. HOORAAAAY! We went into the house to find the public power had finally come back on.
We let the generator run a bit, and then did the test it is supposed to be doing on a weekly basis before turning it off. We have NOW put it on our calendars the day and time the generator is supposed to test itself, so that we don’t miss it. Our insulation is so good now that we can’t hear it come on unless we have the doors open. We also put it on our ‘winter prep’ list to check when we bought the battery for the generator so that we can replace it, if needed, BEFORE something like this happens again.
Since this morning, I have been going around turning lights off. We turned many on while we didn’t have power – as a habit – and forgot to turn them off when nothing happened. We also had to go to ‘manual’ on getting our garage door up without power, and then had to figure out how to hook it up again so that we can push the button on our remote again. We reset all the clocks, turning off the alarm that was still beeping upstairs, etc.
This goes to show how spoiled we are – how dependent on electricity we are – and how very LUCKY we are that this morning served as a wake up call to be SURE we are prepared before we get snowed in!
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