I turned on the bathroom heater as I shaved this
morning. After a few minutes it stopped working. So once scraped I took the
heater apart, dusted it out and it still didn’t work. Neither did most of the
power sockets in the kitchen. We tested all the main fuses. All were fine, but
still the power wasn’t working. But nil desperandum – that’s what we
have home emergency insurance for.
I phoned Sainsbury’s insurance who were closed. Their
emergency number said we had a policy with Sainsburys but that we weren’t
covered for emergencies. They could send an electrician, but that wouldn’t be
cheap.
With no alternative I gave them a hundred and fifty
quid and hoped for the best. At eleven o’clock we had a text saying that an
electrician would be along between ten and twelve o’clock.
I munzed and wordled and waited patiently for the
electrician.
At half past twelve we had a phone call saying he was
running late and should be with us by six o’clock.
We then had an idea that we wanted to keep all the
stuff in the fridge and freezer cold. So we ran out a cable from a working plug
socket to the freezer. There was minor consternation when it didn’t work, but
actually plugging it in worked wonders.
And then…
I pulled the fridge out and unplugged it and both the
dishwasher and the washing machine started making beeping noises. “er
indoors TM”’s smelly electric candle
thing started flickering too. We then spent an entertaining few minutes turning
electrical things off and on and watching the reaction of other electrical
things. If it was a plumbing issue I would have said there was low water pressure.
There was enough leccie getting through to make things beep and make the dials
flash, but not enough for them to actually do anything properly.
The electrician showed up shortly after one o’clock. The
poor bloke had started his day making an hour’s journey to Bexhill only to find
the customer had gone out. From there he’d gone to a customer in Tonbridge (one
hour – thirty miles) before coming to us (another hour – thirty-five
miles), and as he arrived his boss rang to say the customer in Bexhill had
come home again and would he go back to Bexhill after seeing us (An hour and
a quarter – forty miles)
The nice man fiddled about and farted about and
brandished a circuit tester. After a while he announced that we’ve got loads of
positive but precious little neutral, and what little we have is a fire hazard.
He didn’t actually say that the bloke who did the kitchen a couple of years ago
was a cowboy, but he pointed out several areas where he would have done things
differently, if not better. Effectively the entire downstairs needs rewiring
and a new fusebox fitting.
The nice man pulled the plug on the iffy bit and set
off to Bexhill.
After a lot more farting about and a trip to the shop
for extension reels we’ve spread the load and for the foreseeable future we
have to decide what will be in use. Washing machine or freezer. We won’t both
have lap-tops on at the same time, and from here on in I am the dishwasher.
I’d like to think that at the moment all is safe, and
I’m taking the line that what with the entire universe being shut down for
Christmas we can’t get anything done immediately and so we’re forced into
taking our time to think about where we go from here.
Where I’m going from here in the first instance is
outside a rather expensive bottle of port and a lump of blue cheese…
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