You probably know that in the event of a power outage or a whopper storm that could cause an outage, you should unplug your electronics. What you may not know is that you should also unplug appliances you may not think of as electronics, like washing machines, air conditioners – anything that’s got computer circuitry in it.
In my case, this advice would be locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. Thanks to the jolt (to coin a collective noun like “parliament of owls”) of power outages we’ve had around State College of late, my washer and AC units are now strictly ornamental.
To review:
- The latest outage, on April 5, occurred during a stupendous thunderstorm.
- The one before that, on April Fool’s Day, happened during a stupendous windstorm. My house went dark for two hours. About 7,000 Centre County customers lost power that day, and more than 200,000 statewide.
- The first one, on March 19, was heralded by an explosion that almost knocked me out of my chair and then knocked out the electricity for four-and-a-half hours. That time, the culprit was a bouquet of mylar balloons, of all things.
The morning after the March 19 outage, thinking things were back to normal, we put a load of laundry in our washing machine, pressed the magic buttons – and nothing happened.
It occurred to me to test our air conditioners. Ditto.
Some of my neighbors reported similar appliance failures. I solicited more stories on the Nextdoor.com website.
Cynthia Flick of Vista Woods lost all her fish when the outage “blew the power strip on my aquarium and fried the water filter.”
Betty Waterhouse of Overlook Heights lost a cable TV box, two surge suppressors and a computer printer. “All replaceable,” she writes, “but still a nuisance.”
My sentiments exactly. (People who own fancy appliances – and can afford to replace them – know better than to look for sympathy.)
Others informed me of the demise of their HVAC system, refrigerator, wine fridge, sound system, microwave oven, furnace, wall heaters…
This is what I mean about not just unplugging computers and smart TVs and such. I knew to do that. It didn’t occur to me to unplug the other items. Nowadays, though, just about everything other than tortilla chips runs on computer chips. And in the throwaway culture that we all know and love so well, once the chips are down, you may as well forget about repairs. Even though, in the case of our washing machine, every inch of it other than that one small component looks shiny and new.
(Pristine it may look, but at 7 or 8 years old, our washer, like its owner, is approaching geezerhood anyway. This should make me feel better. It doesn’t. The more high-tech they make these gizmos, the shorter their lifespan. Grrr.)
Just for giggles, I tried to get the power company to buy me a new washer and AC system. Denied:
“Your claim was caused by conditions beyond our control. There is no evidence…to suggest negligence on behalf of West Penn Power.”
Fair enough, but after the experience of the last few weeks, the whole wires-on-poles system seems a little flimsy to me.
West Penn’s suggestion: File an insurance claim. I did. Also denied.
My real concern here is not reimbursement, but what, if anything, three prolonged outages in two weeks portend, aside from sour milk in the fridge. As all of us gaze, with increasing alarm, at the hurricanes, tornados, atmospheric rivers and cataclysmic fires that increasingly afflict so many parts of the country, we have taken some small comfort in living in a place that, whatever its faults, seems less prone to disaster than those other places. But is the honeymoon ending? We’re probably not going to have western-style wildfires anytime soon, but what about hurricanes and tornados?
On April 1, the wind gusted to 68 miles per hour on the Beaver Stadium roof – 6 mph short of hurricane strength.
I asked Mike Doll, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, if our recent storms are part of an emerging pattern. In other words, is this to be our version of the adverse effects of climate change? Possibly, Doll said, but there’s no hard data to go on yet.
Nice to hear, just as it was nice to hear from our finance guy that, slumps and all, the stock market’s trajectory is steadily upward. But what if past is no longer prologue, in our climate system or our financial system?
Whatever the weather, there will always be suicidal squirrels (good band name, no?). So even if neither hurricane alley nor tornado alley is about to become a highway wide enough to have exit ramps in Central Pennsylvania, these recent outages convince me it’s time to up my surge protection game. You might want to do the same.
