![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Shovelling.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n\nWell we got snow all right. Here’s what our stairs looked like when Eric had shoveled the top one, this morning at 8.30:\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\nAnd here’s the state of affairs less than 9 hours later, at 5pm:\n<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Post-shovelling.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
\nAnd (as warned) there were disruptions to civic services. Train delays, of course – no surprise. Rather more surprisingly there was something weird going on with our electricity supply. At some point during the afternoon we lost power to a quarter of the house. It was early enough that I had no lights on, and I didn’t notice that my Mac had switched to battery power. After a while I thought it was getting unusually cold here, got up to check the temperature (thinking that perhaps I was just coming down with a cold) and indeed it was barely over 15°C. All the heaters in the room were off, and I quickly realized that we had no power in the room.\n<\/p>\n
\nA fuse, I thought, and spent almost an hour hunting the culprit. The wiring in this house is a mishmash, installed at different times through its history. As proof, consider the situation I had: living room all without power; some outlets in the kitchen OK, some not; ceiling lamps in the kitchen without power; ceiling lamp in hallway without power; wall outlet in hallway OK.\n<\/p>\n
\nWe have three fuse boxes, one up in the house and two side by side in the basement. The ones in the basement are at least labelled; the one up here was a total mystery – I wasn’t even sure if it was still in use. Anyway all the fuses in all boxes looked perfectly OK to me. Nevertheless I took three trips to the basement, replacing various fuses which I thought might be relevant, based on the scanty labelling. No luck.\n<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Cables.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nDuring this time the temperature had gone from 15.3 to 14.7 and I realized that it will soon be seriously unpleasantly cold in here. I took a break from my investigations and focused on damage control instead. The good thing about electrical heaters is that you can plug them into any outlet you want, as long as you have enough extension cord. So I spread a network of extension cables from the kitchen to the living room, and got two of the three heaters hooked up, as well as some lamps.\n<\/p>\n
\nBack to investigating. Now I went through all those unlabelled fuses up here (I think there were nine in total). Still no luck. Surely the juice in the living room couldn’t be affected by fuses labelled “heater (basement)” or “wall outlets and lighting, bathroom”! I couldn’t face more running back and forth between the house and the basement. It really was a task for two people and phones: one to fiddle with the fuses and one to check what happens in the house. But Eric and Ingrid were out at Junibacken. At this point I gave up, spent a little more time installing more extension cords to let me have a desk lamp in the kitchen, and started cooking dinner.\n<\/p>\n
\nEric and Ingrid got home, and Eric spent some more time investigating. Still no success. Then, just as dinner was almost done, the house went all black for a moment. The next moment the power came back – including in the previously dark part of the house. And we’re both thinking – wait a moment, what just happened here? Are we supplied by two separate power lines? But we only have one meter… Or is the old half of the house somehow more sensitive to small voltage fluctuations? No idea. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. I don’t like mysteries in my electricity supply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well we got snow all right. Here’s what our stairs looked like when Eric had shoveled the top one, this morning at 8.30: And here’s the state of affairs less than 9 hours later, at 5pm: And (as warned) there were disruptions to civic services. Train delays, of course – no surprise. Rather more surprisingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[323,322,97,105,234,95],"class_list":["post-1516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-house_and_garden","tag-blackout","tag-electricity","tag-house","tag-snow","tag-stockholm","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1516"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16656,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions\/16656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}