Thoughts on living without electricity for a few days

[williamwright]

Meths? Are things that bad?

Bill

PS: have you tried hand sanitiser?

[ARW]

Your post and how you got through it was well worth a read.

BTW You did steal the natural hot water bottle by choosing the dog and not the wife to cuddle up to.

Dogs have a warmer body temperature than humans.

[Andrew]

So the fleas should stay on rover ?.

In centuries past, I believe it was common to put a pig in the bed at a lodging house, for a few minutes, so the bed bugs had their feed on piggy. Then remove, and retire to bed.

[Andrew]

At least you weren't accused of 'stealing' from 'Horizon' then.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Name one.

[Robin]

Clotrimazole pessary

[The Natural Philosopher]

Is that a consumer product? It still comes in nice packaging. I don't regard prescription medicines as consumer products, but they are actively marketed to the *medical profession*, as 'dream drugs' Cf Statins and Seroxat.

[John Brown]

Basic food ingredients.

[SH]

According to

clotrimazole is an anti-fungal......

[williamwright]

When our post office closed we suddenly had no-one to ask about all sorts of non-post office matters.

Bill

[williamwright]

There's a whole category called 'distress purchases'. Things bought out of necessity and nothing else.

lavatory paper grey socks a bag of sand/cement to repair the path at your sister's house despite knowing you'll get no thanks eurax for anal itching a pack of four light bulbs aerosol of Urine Off a bowl for next to the bed for unexpected vomiting a tyre for the daughter's old banger a ream of A4 a sink plunger a set of drain rods M & S underwear some new glasses a pack of four tins of Morrison's baked beans dental floss

Bill

[williamwright]

It's for thrush. It's strange is thrush. You always wonder who you got it from.

Bill

[Sn!pe]

It's commonly a spontaneous infection after a course of antibiotics. Everyone carries Candida Albicans on or in themselves. It's an opportunist pathogenic yeast that often takes advantage of the niche vacated by the antibiotic's target organism. DAMHIK.

[Martin Brown]

The problem was that in a fully discharged state the iPhone X was unable to obtain enough power from the in car USB socket to ever reboot. This was damned annoying in the middle of a very long power cut.

In practice it turned out that we would have been no better off being able to see the Northern Powergrid website since the status information displayed there about my locale was entirely incorrect. I might have tried a lot harder to speak to a human on the Saturday night if I had realised they thought we were back on grid though.

The automated responses seemed to have been constructed by someone with no emergency status message training and referred to "now". What you need in an emergency is to know when the message was recorded, an estimated time to repair and when they hope to be able to provide an update. We had none of that information either by phone or online.

The dalek only offered: "Is your house mains power off?" YES/NO "Have you checked your main breaker?" YES/NO You could hang on to speak to an adviser and the Dalek would tell you how many minutes long the queue was and then when that time elapsed simply closed down the call without connecting you.

There was no option to say "It is the entire village not just me!".

The guy who actually got an engineer visit had to allow them to dismantle his main fuse and then check the dropwire from the pole outside before they would believe him that it was an external fault.

Tick box mentality gone mad. Unless they did that he would be charged for a false callout! (I'm not kidding)

[Martin Brown]

Oh we get power cuts most years and most big storms but usually they last between 4 and 10 hours and NEDL as they then were fixed things reasonably promptly. Last really big one was when a milk tanker totalled one of their poles and 10m of mature holly hedge one frosty morning.

That took all day on the coldest day of the year but they were able to fix it within 10 hours despite very serious damage. The problem this time was that Northern Powergrid were impossible to contact and when/if you did they proved to be clueless.

It was as if their emergency response droids work 9-5 Monday to Friday so please call back with your emergency during office hours.

The wind up torches although a bit of a novelty are effective for a short while.

I'm inclined to stick with LED torches and keep feeding them batteries. I don't mind flames for heating or static use but don't like moving them around. Sources of ignition are always a potential risk.

[Chris Green]

I have to say that our "number to phone if there's a power cut" is excellent. We are in south Suffolk and do get the occasional power outage, sometimes for maintenance and sometimes due to hardware failure (the last was a transformer failure).

We have to call "24Seven Electricity" and get a real person who nearly always knows exactly why we have lost power, if not they offer to find out and call back - and they always call back.

[Graeme]

I was, but only on a small scale compared to many others. About 6 months after I started here, things went pear shaped for a while, into the thousands, but came back to a loss of around 750 which I had to pay on the spot, by cheque. Another 250 'reappeared' and the remaining 500 I got back over time, because accuracy rules only applied to postmasters, not their employees, who were clowns.

I could go on :-)

[Tim Lamb]

I think Eastern Electricity head office used to be at Martlesham. Perhaps they have a residual.

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[Theo]

TBH I've not found integrated car USB sockets any good for charging things. They're mostly for two things: storing music to play on the sound system, and updating the firmware/maps/etc of the head unit. When I've run my phone as a satnav using one (mostly in rental cars) the battery has simply gone down less slowly than being unplugged.

I think things have got a lot better in the last few years as manufacturers have realised that's what people use them for. But then the design pipeline of a new car is often several years, so even today's models have old tech in them.

This is why it makes a lot of sense to have a discrete cigar lighter charger, with your phone's preferred variety of fast charging protocol(s). Then you can switch it out when you get a new phone with a newer charging standard.

Ob DIY: this is also why I don't like USB wall sockets.

Theo

[Martin Brown]

It has always worked perfectly well in the past. Only when the iPhone was completely flat battery was there a problem. I will investigate it further (but not during winter storm season).

So does ours but Northern Powergrid managed not to give out accurate or timely information. If you cannot trust what they say because it is demonstrably wrong and cannot correct it either what do you do?

The engineers on site were also confused by businesses who have their own near silent generators (due to inability/inadequacy of supply).

In theory so does ours but the clueless muppets operating it managed to flag segments that were off power were on and vice versa. Individual houses were marked as being off power rather than whole villages!