Yes, stupid power company! Ok they may not be stupid but they really annoyed us yesterday\/last night. I was watching a little Scrubs yesterday at about 4:45pm when we had what appeared to be a power glitch. My computers all went down, the TV turned off and the AC went off. I grabbed the AC remote and tried to get it to come back on but all it would do is light the LED and not really turn on. Then I tried to reboot one of my computers and it wouldn’t start up. It would just make the screen flash wavy lines. It was really strange and I finally figured out we were having a brown-out instead of a black-out.<\/p>\n
I grabbed my voltmeter and jammed it in the wall to see what we were getting. Instead of the normal 110-120V we were getting between 40 and 70 but it was mainly nearer to 50V.<\/p>\n
At that voltage most electronics won’t work but light bulbs will light in a half-bright mode. Strangely my Uniden Police Scanner did work. I think it’s because the power converter for that normally puts out 13 volts and the radio will work on as low as 9.<\/p>\n
At the time of the brownout it was around 103 outside which was down from the 110 high. Inside it was around 85 as our main AC has gone to working intermittently and we were actually waiting for a phone call from a repair guy.<\/p>\n
Four of us piled into the car to go to a few cooler places in hopes the power would be back on when we returned home. It wasn’t on when we got home about 7 but shortly after that it went to a complete blackout.<\/p>\n
By this time it was around 93 inside and 95 outside so I grabbed my Honda 2KW generator and connected the portable AC unit in our room. It kept overloading so I finally decided I needed a heavier extension cord. Betty and I went to Home Depot and got a 25 ft\/ 12 gauge cord. When we got home I went outside and connected it and then started the generator. It wouldn’t run decently for 10 minutes then it finally did. I don’t know why but I’m glad it stopped acting up as I was tired and hot and wanted a cool place to sleep.<\/p>\n
With the new cord the generator ran fine until it ran out of gas around 3am. I got up about a half hour later and filled and restarted it. At 5:50am the overhead light in our room popped on and woke me up. It felt so good to have power after not having it for 13 hours. Now I’m tempted to get a larger generator that will handle 2 AC units but I probably won’t.<\/p>\n
On another note but related it took down the power supply in one of my computers.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve finally got them all up and working again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, stupid power company! Ok they may not be stupid but they really annoyed us yesterday\/last night. I was watching a little Scrubs yesterday at about 4:45pm when we had what appeared to be a power glitch. My computers all went down, the TV turned off and the AC went off. I grabbed the AC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}