It's All Black

This is the what we woke up to yesterday morning.

We had no power. The street lights were on, but everything electrical in the house was off. I went for a walk up the street to see if anyone else's lights were on, but it appeared not, although there were lights on in the windows of houses at the bottom of the street. Then I encountered our neighbour taking her car from the garage, and she said yes, she did have power.

Odd. I checked our Linky (the you beaut communicating power meter) and it was blank. By this time I had connected my tablet to the internet, and following the instructions, pressed buttons to see what message it was giving me. According to the Enedis website it should have said something - but it said nothing.

So Susan rang Enedis, and after five minutes on hold, got through to a person - a man who took things slowly and repeated himself so the poor confused Anglos at the other end of the line understood. We reported we had no power, and after a while he said he would send a technician.

We also sent a text to Tim (who with his wife Carolyn lives in a house backing on to our garage). He was checking his fuses, because although there was power and lighting in the house, there was no power to his heating boiler. He then sent another message to say the Enedis said that power would be returned by 13:00, and that it was only one phase of power that has fallen over, so it was one house in three on that circuit (I may not be being over technical here...) that had lost power, and his boiler was on the same phase as our house.

It was obviously on the same phase as our other neighbours, because 5 minutes later Christine knocked on our door and asked if we had power, and I was able to pass on the message.

About 15 minutes later, our power returned.