A fuse shortage can cause a short fuse

Fuse Box Panel (Photo credit: The Adventures of Kristin & Adam)

Emily is off school this week, so I scheduled some time off for Daniel and was eagerly anticipating some free time to catch up on laundry, sewing/quilting, and scrap booking - not necessarily in that order.  SNEL, our electric company, did not agree with my agenda.

Power here comes into the house in three phases. For those of you who, like me, know virtually nothing about wiring and electricity, each phase is a wire coming into our circuit box.  Each wire supplies 220 volt power to various breaker switches.  It is not uncommon here for one phase to randomly go out or have voltage that is too low and therefore bad for appliances and electronics.  When that happens, my handy-dandy husband makes a "bridge" in the circuit box to join two main breakers to one good phase.  It means I might have to turn off the hot water heater if I want to run the dryer but hey, I can live with that.

For over a week now, when we have power, it has been only one phase, and that phase has been coming in at only 140 to 170 volts.  Power for the whole neighborhood has been going off before 7am and staying off until late evening.  Last night when the power came on, we had two phases!  For two minutes!  Seriously.  After two minutes we were down to one phase again.  One minute later we had nothing. I called my friend down the street.  She had power, which meant that as usual, it was just my little section of road.

We have been told by a new neighbor who came in and did some research that our line is older than this country is.  It was put in while the Belgians were still in control.  The switches in the cabine where our transformer is located are all rotted so no one can even use them anymore.  The fuses for our street were missing completely and someone had hot-wired a bypass.  We are paying for new fuses, $25 each for three of them (one for each phase), and hoping our neighbors will pitch in toward the cost but in the past they have refused.  The fuses aren't the problem.  When we do have power, even though we always only have one phase, it's never the same one.  The bypass was probably put there because fuses were blowing left and right, but the only way to find out for certain is to try putting in fuses and wiring it correctly.

We've been told that our line is nothing but bits and pieces and will only get worse.  It is so bad that the new neighbor paid thousands of dollars to get permits and have the electric company move his house to a different line.  I gotta tell you that when someone who actually knows something about the situation and about the way things work here says something like that to you, it does dampen your spirits a little.

We have a missionary friend who has spent countless hours trying to help us, even though she lives on the "good section" of our line and often has power when we don't.  She is arranging a meeting today with a representative of the electric company and has invited the women of the neighborhood.  I plan to be there!  Please keep not just our family, but our neighborhood in your prayers.