OT-- electric outage....in half the house.

Hi Pati, I can commiserate with you because the painters finally finished painting the upstairs of my house. That includes the bookshelves, my sewing room and the office. I hated to take is all out of place and now tomorrow I get to put it all back. When it comes to electricity I would not mess around. I know it will be a real pain, but do it. You don't want any bigger problems in your walls. If I was there I would help. Of course for something chocolate! Linda whose house smells of fresh paint in Plano Texas

Get it fixed! A family in Nampa, Idaho, was recently burned out because the window air conditioner caught on fire. It had been tripping the circuit breaker, but instead of doing something about that, they just kept using it and lost their house in the process. Granted it was terribly hot here, from

What is strange is that none of the circuit breakers were tripped, and all have power............. sigh. We are working on moving things to get to the outlets.

Then this afternoon went to dump some recyclables in the bin and "squished" as I stepped on the carpet........... the air was working but not the sump pump. so spent time/still spending time sopping up water from soggy carpet. Also had to move fridge out from the wall to enable me to plug a power cord in to plug the sump pump into. sigh.................

Pati > Get it fixed! A family in Nampa, Idaho, was recently burned out because the

In the spirit of cooperation, I will take all books except the romance stuff. You will have to find another kind soul for them (if you read them). Just box up the books and send them to the royal palace and I will watch over them for you. RedQueen

First of all, get it fixed! You don't want to screw around with electrical problems, trust me on this! And think of the golden opportunity you have to clean places that haven't been cleaned in years, the chance to sort through your stash and your books--and maybe get some new quilt ideas and revisit some old literary friends in the process. Good chance to paint the walls, too, if they need it. This is where grown children come in so handy, they can help out Mom and Dad and earn a few brownie points. Local teenagers are probably willing to help--for a fee, of course. ;-)

LOL You don't really want all the technical/historical/arms and armor/ language books of my DH's do you? Plus the cost to ship them would be astronomical.

Pati, in Phx

Judy Grevenites wrote:

Oh Pati! To have one thing (the power outage) happen is bad enough, but to have the sump pump go as well...I feel for you. We have BTDT too many times to remember. If you have a shop vac, or can borrow one (and an extension cord), they work pretty good at getting the water from the carpets. The other thing is that, if you have one, get a floor fan going - aimed at the carpet. Nearly half our basement flooded when our pump didn't work as it should have - the entire laundry room, the half bath, and about 1/3 of the carpeting in the family room were soaked. We mopped the family room and the bathroom, sopped up as much as we could with towels, dragged out the shop vac, and then had the fan going.....took a while, but it finally got dried out.

Larisa, will> What is strange is that none of the circuit breakers were tripped, and all have

And since I have a cat that tends to spray for no reason, I can take the nasty stash and will even clean it for you (we use detergent with no color or fragrance, and fabric softener with no frabrance or color as well).

Larisa

Pat > Since your elderly cat 'visited' your stash, I don't want .... uh

We lost power in half the house once. I replaced all of the glass/porcelain fuses, with no obvious difference. Then I noticed that the other parts of the fuse box that came out had cardboard type fuses. These looked like the original fuses that came with the house. I went paranoid and replaced *all* of them. Ta-da, full power in the house.

I'm thinking I may just replace the fuses in total on a semi-regular bases as a good idea.

-georg

I'd agree with this. One of my friend had their neighbor somehow manage to 'nick' their cable and they lost power to half the house, only half the house. It took the power company two trips and almost a day to figure out what had happened and fix it. The neighbor had put one of his fence posts too close to the underground powerline going from the 'mini-transformer' in his backyard (dunno about other areas, but around here we've got these lovey green 'mini's, one for about every 4-6 houses) to my friend's house and had cut half of the line, thus resulting in my friend's loss of half her power.

unfortunately, no fuses......... all circuit breakers. And none of them were tripped. sigh.

Pati, > We lost power in half the house once. I replaced all of the

We had the same problem. For some goofy reason, the gfi outlet in our little bathroom is on the same circuit as the outlet on the front porch. Took us awhile to figure out why the outlet on the porch wasn't working!

It's just weird how they wire houses sometimes. The only one of those outlets I've ever had trip is the one in the half bath and that bathroom is very rarely used.

How about "renting" your church youth group for a donation? Ours does this sometimes. The kids who need Community Service for school come with their books to be signed (it counts because the youth group is being paid, not the individual kid). Feed them pizza and soda.

Kim

We had the power go out in one bedroom, the garage, and all the bathrooms last year. It turned out that it was a bad GFI outlet in the garage! Don't know why that was where they put the GFI!

I had to get a replacement GFI outlet and wait for daylight to replace it (power had to be shut off at the main circuit), but it was an easy repair and now it works just fine! At the same time I bought another GFI to replace the one in the kitchen, figuring it would probably "go" soon, too, but haven't gotten around to that yet.

Dragonfly