We arrived home from our failed blimp finding mission in Hilton Head, in the late afternoon after driving about 350 miles. Donna walked into the laundry room (it’s at the back of the garage) to empty the little car “litter” bag. The light didn’t come automatically on, we have a motion sensor switch in there so you don’t have to flick a switch while holding a full laundry basket. I said, “The light bulb probably burnt out. I’ll check it in a minute.”
The first thing I noticed when walking into the house was the desktop computer was off. I looked into the spare bedroom and the LED alarm clock was dark. Donna noticed the microwave clock was blank too. The power must be off. But wait a minute, the ceiling fans were spinning, the power can’t be off. Besides, the garage door went up on demand…hmmm. A quick walk through the house and saw that the LED alarm clock in the middle bedroom was blank. The one in our bedroom was dark too, but the clock in the Ipod charger/player was on though. The LED clock under the TV was dark as well and the cable modem/router was flashing a bunch random lights instead of its usual compliment. TV came on, but no programming, the cable must be off.
We must have had a power failure. We went outside to ask a neighbor what had happened and that’s when we noticed a fairly large tree branch down on the far side of the front lawn. As we walked over we noticed another bunch of tree debris in our neighbor’s driveway. Donna said, “Good thing the neighbor had his truck on the lawn because that is right where he normally parked.” Took a closer look at the truck and we could see that it had been hit by a falling branch and moved after. We looked up and spotted a place on one of our trees where the offending may have come from. I went to their front door and rang the bell.
Neighbor came out and said, “Neat, huh?” As we walked back towards the driveway he described what happened. “At about 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon they heard a loud bang and came outside. There was a tree branch laying on the hood of his truck, but more alarming was the live power line laying on his lawn that had been ripped from the side of our house. He called the power company and within an hour they had restored power to our house. He said the reason the TV cable isn’t on in your house is because it came down with the power line, it is coiled up at the bottom of the pole on the other side of the street.” When I said, “I’ll be calling our insurance company because we have a bunch of electrical devices that are toast in our house and I’ll tell them about your truck.” “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “I’ve already called Geico for the truck because when I looked up I could see where the branch came off my tree, so I took care of it.”
Sure enough, looking up I could see where it might have fallen off his tree. But directly across his driveway in our yard you could see a spot where it might have fallen off our tree. If we had a bucket truck or either one of us had a 40 foot vertical leap we could get a definitive answer on whose tree it was. The neighbor said, “You take care of yours and I’ll take care of mine.” “Fine with me,” I replied.
Further investigation around the house netted a passel of damaged stuff. The aforementioned 4 LED clocks, the microwave, the Kuerig coffee maker, the desktop PC’s speakers, the charger for the Dustbuster, the transformer for the sprinkler system, the 30-year old boombox in the garage, the electric pencil sharpener, the LED light bulb over the front porch, the LED bug light in the same location and the biggy, the dishwasher. There was a smell of ozone in the middle bedroom, but only the one LED clock was bad, the other three items plugged-in in the room were fine.
One of the EFI outlets on the screened porch had tripped, so I reset it. Later in the evening when we went back out it had tripped again. I went out to the breaker box and turned off the power to the porch, I then went under the house and checked the wire run, but (in my inexpert opinion) couldn’t see anything wrong. With discretion being the better part of valor, I added calling an electrician to my Monday morning phone call list to go along with State Farm, the cable company and an appliance repairman.