A while ago, the lights in my kitchen started flickering every once in a while - it was windy out at the time, and I thought nothing of it. Then, a few weeks later, I thought I saw them flickering again, but it was so intermittent, I couldn’t tell. This weekend, I came home and discovered my stove’s clock was reset. I thought it was funny at the time, because I didn’t notice that the power had gone out on my servers, but it had gone out on my Pro upstairs (and the UPS was complaining loudly). Last night, I was sitting in my chair, and the power in my kitchen, hallway, and upstairs went out for about 45 minutes. I got nervous and called my mom for advice. Because I had no idea what was causing it. It could have been a frayed wire, could have been anything that could cause a fire…

I didn’t think it was an emergency, so I waited until this morning to call the electrician. Great, he’ll be here between 12 and 4. He shows up about 11:45 (glad I left work early enough to be home at 11:30), and checks out my breaker box. Turns out that an entire phase of electricity coming into my breaker is out. A quick check at the electric box and it turns out that it’s a problem on Pepco’s side. So he leaves me with the details to call Pepco about it. As luck would have it, my neighbors already called a pepco guy, and he comes up the sidewalk as my electrician went down it. So now the pepco electrician has it straight from another electrician’s mouth what the problem is. Evidently, my neighbors were also having problems.

So, the current situation is that I have power (in half of my house), and the servers have power, but other major things like the heat pump, water heater, stove, clothes dryer don’t. The hot water heater is technically two phase, which means it’s getting power from the other phase, but not enough, so it could burn up the element, so on the advice of the electrician, it’s breaker is thrown until power is completely restored properly. Although it sucks, if I really want a hot shower, I can go to the gym in the morning. Then I think Brian and I will spend the weekend at his place - where he *does* have hot water