On or Off?

Filed under: Everyday Life by Angela

About three days ago, my kids came into my bedroom and told me they didn’t have power in their bedrooms. Okay, no big deal. I checked the breaker box and sure enough, a breaker had been tripped. I reset it and went on with my day. I’m electrically knowledgeable enough to do that.

Yesterday, the same thing happened. When I went to the breaker box, there wasn’t anything tripped. But, not just the lights and power in the kids’ room were out but so were the lights and power in the kids’ bathroom, the utility room, kitchen and dining room. But, no tripped breakers. I called the office to tell them I had a problem and their first response was “Did you call the PUD?”. When I explained that I didn’t think it was a PUD issue because I did have partial power in the apartment. I was told they would get ahold of maintenance and get back with me.

About 15 minutes later, the lights came back on. Then, I get a knock at the door. The manager had reset the main breaker outside. She showed me how to do the same thing in case there were more problems over the weekend and assured me they would take care of it on Monday. When I came back upstairs, the utility room light was on and the fan was running. I turned on the kitchen light and noticed the utility room vent ’slowed down’. I turned off the kitchen light again and back on and the same thing happened. I tried one more time and the lights went back off again, this time to stay. I caught the manager before she was back to the office and we reset it again. When I came back up stairs, we had no power at all.

I walked over to the office and told her what was happening (by this time it was 5:30 on a Friday night, of course). She called the maintenance man to come back and called the PUD.

Tony, the maintenance man, comes over switches off the main power again and restores partial power to the apartment. He came upstairs, checked the breaker box, and removed the switch in the kids’ bathroom (Kid #3 had been trying to turn on the light when all this started) and see’s nothing wrong in either place. He leaves to get his multimeter and by the time he gets back, we have partial power to the rooms (I had done nothing). He tests with the multimeter and it’s reading “70″. The outlet was reading 120, which I think must be what the lights should have read.

At this point, he’s at a loss. We decide to really test it out and we turned on the air conditioner to see what would happen with that. It didn’t make any changes at all. We went down stairs and determined the compressor wasn’t working.

Tony decides to go get two extension cords so that we could plug in the freezer and fridge into outside outlets in case something happened overnight. As he was getting ready to leave, I asked if I should turn off the a/c as the compressor wasn’t running. He told me to go ahead and do that.

I came back upstairs, turned off the a/c and then the power in the original rooms went out. Ran down and told him and he just shakes his head, and says to turn it back on and he’d be back with the extension cords. I turned it back on and the power in the rooms was at about the same level as they might be in a black out - in other words, partial power in every room.

He returns with the cords and was about to leave to deal with it today and the PUD shows up. I’m down talking to his wife. Tony deals with the PUD and comes back downstairs. He tells me I have full power now. They hadn’t done anything to give me full power.

Tony tells me to leave the A/C on all night (yuck, I’m now cold with my portable heater on next to me). I have and so far today, we seem to have full electricity. We’ll see if this lasts if I do a load of laundry.

So, for now, I’m on.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under the categories Everyday Life with the tags . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.