When I got home from Florida last week, I noticed that I was having some electrical problems in my home. The lights would flicker, the UPS my computer is plugged into would beep and chirp and sound all angry; hints that something bad is going on. Oh, and my cable didn't work, either; quite odd stuff.
The first thing I did was contact the cable company, and they had a service technician come out on Saturday. He discovered that the cable running to my house had actually melted at the connection point, and that the ground wire from the cable box was running live current. That didn't sound like a good thing, so my father came out and checked out my circuit box. It turned out that the electrical system inside my home was fine, but the power coming in from the electric company was too hot on one end of the circuit, with the voltage being too high.
So, I called the electric company on Monday and I guess a crew came out to check the situation on Tuesday, because I came home to find a large, long, temporary power cable running from the electric company's box on my property, all the way across two other properties, and into a larger feeder box down the street. At least my power problems were solved, as there was no more flickering or angry UPS system.
However, it turns out that problems were had by more than just me. Other people on my street had experienced the same problems, and my neighbor Greg even had his satellite receiver, AC compressor, and garage door opener fried by power spikes, costing him many hundreds of dollars to get fixed. So, while my situation wasn't good, it could have been a whole lot worse.
Ah, the joys of home ownership.
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