April 9, 2021 It sounded like a gunshot. I was outside at the time, and ran over toward the road, where I could see some smoke drifting nearby the neighbors driveway. Literally, I thought someone had let off a muzzle loader or something! It was shockingly loud. Dave, the neighbor on our side, walked out to the road and we pondered what could have happened…. we all still had power (another neighbor texted me, too), so what in the world?
A bit later, two things happened. The Comcast cable guy drove up the road, slowly, looking for problems. He saw me and stopped…. I still had service, but he had an outage on the road, so…. he got out and looked at the pole outside our house – the one with the 3 cans for the 3 phase electric (that almost no “normal” people have, but clearly that’s not us). He pointed out that a fuse had blown! A bit of a mystery since we still had power AND cable, but then a neighbor from up the road drove up in his Prius wanting to know if we had power, because he didn’t! The cable guy left to do his thing and I called the electric company to let them know what was up.
So the electric company guy really gave me a very complete lesson on transformer fuses, and explained about the electric service on our little dirt road. First, when people say a “transformer blew” that is incorrect – it is the fuse that blew, to protect the rather expensive transformer. 🙂 The pole outside our house is the terminus of the 3 phase power that comes in off of Route 4 (the previous owner must have been incredibly persistent to get Eversource to even bring the 3 phase up our road!) Everyone on the road beyond us just has access to single phase normal household current. That is the fuse that blew – and who knows why? Further up the road, perhaps a squirrel sacrificed himself to the electricity gods, or a branch randomly fell onto the line… no one knows, But whatever happened caused the fuse to pop, which makes a noise just like a gunshot! Here is a short video – turn up the sound! Haha, here is another video that someone found amusing enough to loop a few times….
Our Eversource power guy took a REALLY long extension pole (and standing in a patch of poison ivy – I have to do something about that!) brought down the old fuse, pushed up the repaired fuse, carefully hooked it on, pushed it up, and snapped it back into place. It was fascinating to watch, too bad I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a video of it. But. watch this Youtube VIDEO of the process. Our neighbor Dave, his little grandson and I watched this whole process, then we turned to each other and said, “Who knew??”.
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