deandra.homeip.net

So, I wake up this morning, at about a quarter to five, and decided to get up. Between my usual insomnia, and my sinus troubles causing me to snort like a mad rhinoceros, further sleep was impossible.

I padded over to the dining room window and glanced out at the encroaching dawn. Something conspicuous caught my eye. "Wait a minute," I said to myself, "aren't my power lines strung above the phone and cable, not below?" As my coffee-deprived brain struggled to catch up with what I was seeing, I decided that, yes, indeed, there was something wrong with the overhead power lines coming to my house. I threw on some clothes and walked outside.

As I reached the road, the cold air forced the last tendrils of sleep from my brain and I confirmed that something was indeed very wrong. Closer examination revealed to me that the Emily Knob had ripped free from the side of the house.

Overhead electrical wiring needs a good solid anchor to carry the weight of the wire. The wire that is strung from the pole to the house consists of three heavy cables: two insulated lines to carry each leg of the 240-volt service, and a third, bare line, to carry the neutral. The third is secured around a sturdy anchor, called an Emily Knob, which is securely bolted to the house. This relives the mast and wiring from having to bear the weight of the cable.

In my case, since my Emily Knob had pulled loose from the house, the cable was being held aloft by the tree in my front yard, and my phone and cable lines, before continuing on across the street to the power pole. The scariest part was that I still had full electrical service; I figured at any minute the connections would fail and the line would fall to the street. I called the BC Hydro emergency line; after confirming that the line was more than 9 feet above the ground, the operator told me he'd schedule a crew to come look at it, "during business hours," to determine if there was any other damage. I decided there was nothing to do for the time being, and headed into work.

At 8:00, I made a couple phone calls. The first contractor I called was already busy with two other emergencies, but he gave me the numbers of a couple other places to try. My next call was a success; someone was available to come up to my house right away and take a look. They advised me to shut off my main breaker, just in case. I headed back home to meet him.

I got home to find my house in the same condition in which I'd left it. My fears of finding my home in charred ruins, or a logging truck entangled in a snare of happily-sparking electrical wires seemed to have been unfounded. I set about preparing my house for a shutdown. Since I'm on a well, I filled up some water containers in case the power was going to be off longer than anticipated. I then shut down my computer equipment, shuddered at the thought of having to reset all my clocks, and threw the Big Black Switch. The red numerals on the microwave winked out.

Neil, the contractor, showed up a few minutes later. He climbed up the ladder, mused at how the old knob had managed to stay in place for so long, and set to work. The old Emily Knob had simply been a lag bolt with a large ceramic structure on the head around which the cable was wrapped. The lag is designed to be driven into a solid wooden structure, like a 2x4 piece of lumber. However, on this house, the line between the knob and the utility pole would have bisected the roof line, so whoever had installed the original knob had spaced it off the fascia with another piece of 2x4 lumber. The problem was, that wooden spacer had only been secured by the lag bolt on the knob, meaning that only about a inch of the lag bolt penetrated into the solid structure of the house. Many years of abuse had finally taken its toll, the threads of the lag bolt lost their grip on the lumber, and the knob pulled free.

Neil decided that, rather than simply install another knob of the same type, he'd beef it up a little to prevent the same problem from happening again. In addition to the standard lag-type knob, Neil had also brought with him a larger knob that used a large bolt, nut, and washer. This was designed to go right through wooden structure and clamp onto it, rather than relying on the grip of threads holding onto wood alone. After pulling away a bit of my soffits, Neil drilled out a hole about three-quarters of an inch in diameter into my fascia, and installed this new, beefier Emily Knob. He also chose to use a piece of 2x4 lumber to keep the lines away from the roof, only this time, the lumber was not attempting to play any kind of role in holding the wires in place. That job was left to the huge galvanized steel bolt and nut, which went through both pieces of wood and held firm. After Neil replaced the soffit, I thanked him for his wonderful work and he left, on his way to his next job.

My next job was to wait for the hydro crew to arrive. I turned on the battery-powered radio and sat down with Tigger. Thankfully I didn't have long to wait.

The Hydro truck pulled into the neighbour's yard; it would be easier for the crew to swing their boom lift out over the fence to reach my electrical connection than it would be to try and drive their truck through the ditch into my front yard. Luckily my neighbour was home, and he had no problem letting them borrow his driveway. One of the workers told me that they probably wouldn't have to disconnect my service. I informed them that, since I'd already turned off the main breaker, they were free to do whatever they needed to.

After he attached a clamp-and-block-and-tackle arrangement to the cable, one of the workers cut away the old knob, which was still attached to the neutral line. Then he pulled the slack out of the lines and attached the neutral to the new Emily Knob. While he was doing this, the other worker popped open my meter box and inspected the contents. Satisfied, he reconnected the meter and affixed a new seal to the ring.

Before the guy in the bucket lift came down, he replaced the crimp connectors binding my house to the grid, and then swung the boom over and, with my permission, removed the tree branches that were near the incoming line. He then parked the boom lift and was done. As they packed up, I went into my house and flipped on the Big Black Switch. The microwave beeped and flashed 12:00... 12:00... 12:00... Success!

I spent the next few minutes bringing my server back online, and then resetting all the clocks in my house. Luckily the thermostats all have backup batteries, or my task would have been far worse. My server was back in action by 10:30 am, but my IP changed during the shutdown, and since I'd misconfigured my DNS updating script, deandra.homeip.net was unreachable from the outside world until about one o'clock in the afternoon. Oh well, c'est la vie.