“May you live in interesting times” is said to be a curse. And our times have certainly had waves of interesting in the past few months. Back in December, I had mentioned our leaking bay window (apparently the guys who put in our new siding and fascia didn’t actually caulk above the window like they were supposed to) and our internet outage. I didn’t mention that my car’s bumper was damaged around the same time, while parked at a public parking lot. Fortunately, the driver left a note and his insurance covered the repairs.
On top of that, while I was in Tennessee in February, there was a power outage that came with a surge that fried the circuit board for our solar inverter. That meant when power was restored, anything running through the solar was still out. Understanding that we had the most essential circuits mapped to the solar power, I came home to a cold house, with pretty much only power in the bedrooms being usable. Did I mention this was in February? Our solar company was able to come out that afternoon, saw the fried circuit board, and bypassed it to get us up and running again. The actual repair – replacing the solar inverter – was originally scheduled for before our Caribbean cruise, but they had to postpone until the day after we returned.
After they finished and left, I was looking out the bay window at the equipment on our wall. Then I turned the other direction and saw something entirely unexpected: the utility pole out back was suddenly leaning. I do mean suddenly; we had done a garden walk after arriving home the day before, so I was fairly sure that it hadn’t started leaning during our trip. I call ComEd, our electrical company, and they had a team out later that day, mostly before the rain picked up. They carefully navigated our trees with the small truck in the second photo, which was then used to prop up the pole. Surprisingly, the power was only out for a brief period while they were working, though I found out the next day that the attached cable wires were affected.
Just over a week later, I received a text warning me about an upcoming outage scheduled for this past Monday. The new pole was delivered to our front yard on Saturday – again, carefully avoiding damage to our plants and trees. On Monday, I intermittently took window breaks to watch the process, including happening to look out at one point when a guy with a chainsaw dropped a piece of the old pole, after having moved the appropriate hardware and wires above that point. The old pole still has some wires, presumably not electrical, attached to it, and it about half the height of the adjacent new pole.
And I’m happy to report that our solar battery kept us up and running throughout the scheduled outage.
