Strange morning

I woke up at about 2:30 a.m. and everything seemed normal.

In other words, the digital clock on my bedside table was on and displaying the time.

I woke up again at 3:30 (it turned out) and the digital clock had gone dark. I got up and found a little battery powered clock that we keep in the WC. With that one, when you push a button in the front of it, it lights up, so I could see what time it was.

My fumbling around with that clock woke Walt up. "We don't have electricity," he said. I told him I knew that. He got up and went down to check the circuit breaker box in the utility room. He couldn't get it to work.

When we bought the house, the black box in this photo seemed to be some kind of master switch. Once or twice it tripped and we thought power was out to the whole neighborhood. It turned out it was just off in our house, and when we pushed a button on the black box it came back on. Who knew why? Not us, that's for sure.

This morning, when Walt pressed the button to raise the solar-powered roll-down shutter in the guest room on the main level of the house, he said he was sure he saw a light on at the neighbor's house across the street. Below is a photo of the new breaker boxes we had installed between 2003 and 2007.

I got up, got dressed, found the key to another neighbor's house, which is standing empty right now. I unlocked and opened the front door, and flipped a light switch. The light came on. So the problem was in our electrics, not the village's.

Without electricity, we have no internet (the modem-router goes out). We have no heat. Well, we can have a wood fire, but trying to get wood brought in and get the fire started in the dark is not easy. We do have cell phones, so we can call for help.

Walt kept messing with the circuit breakers. When he flipped the main breaker switch, the current would flash on for a split second, but the breaker kept tripping when he let go of it.

So he turned off all the individual breakers and then turned the main breaker on again. It held! So he started flipping the other breakers one at a time. When he turned on the third or fourth one, the main breaker switched off again. So he isolated the problem.

Why it's a problem we don't know. That breaker controls an outlet in the entry way that was installed in 2007. The only things plugged into it were a digital clock and a lamp timer. I went and unplugged those and he tried flipping that breaker again. When he switched on the breaker for that outlet, with nothing plugged into it, the main breaker tripped again.

Anyway, except for that outlet, our electricity is back on again. I was going to post about the state of the attic in the house when we bought it in 2002. With photos. I'll do that tomorrow. As for the circuit panel, when we moved into the house it worked with metal fuses. The electrician who replaced it with breakers asked us if we knew how old it was. We said it must have been put in when the house was built in the late 1960s. He said that old panel would already have been considered une antiquité in the 1960s.