Saturday, December 4

Electrical Embers

Last night the power went off for a couple of hours in my neighbourhood.  This is not unusual in itself.  Our section of "the grid" seems to lose power quite often, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that we lose power (even just momentarily) more often than anywhere else on PEI.  So, losing power, as I say, wasn't unusual.
What was unusual was that, last night when the power went out, everything shut down, then a moment later there was the faintest amount of power still passing through our home.  The lights that were on a moment before the outage were still glowing, but ever so faintly.  I would guess at 5% of 'normal' capacity.  The televisions and computers, etc all shut down, but the power lights on the computers were still glowing, faintly.
It was kind of spooky.  We turned off all the lights etc, because the weak glowing wasn't powerful enough for us to see properly.  After about half an hour of outage, the faint glowing disappeared, presumably as that lingering electrical enegy drained itself from the grid.  About an hour and a half after that, the power returned.



When the power returned, I discovered that our main computer had lost all its cookie settings, and I am now trying to remember the various cookie-stored usernames and passwords that I use for various sites I visit.



1 comment:

al o'neill said...

Funny, one would think that having a non-standard amount of current flowing over the grid would be quite harmful to certain types of electrical devices...
Then again, having too much power flowing caused my laptop's power brick to melt, so too little is probably more desireable.