My little office is back on utility power!

Last Thursday the line crews came down the street, repaired the last leaning pole, and restored power to the remainder of my street. That SHOULD have done it for us.

However, we’ve got a slightly oddball transformer connection, three-phase 240 volt open delta with a center tap on one transformer for 120-240 single phase, for you power geeks.

There was no way I was going to cut us off the generator back to utility power without checking voltages coming into the place, and when I did, I found that one of our two transformers was dead. Of course, it HAD to be the one which was necessary to provide single-phase voltage to our shop.

I called the utility company, talked to the nice lady and told her that I had a power outage. No, not a storm-induced outage, just that they restored power and I had a dead transformer. That was Thursday. I called again Friday. I called again yesterday.

Yesterday evening I had to do something that required a voltmeter, so while I was out getting mine out of my vehicle, I made a pass by and measured the voltages on the meter base. Lo and behold, everything was back to normal. Apparently Entergy came by and fixed things without telling us.

I intended to cut our lines to the generator and put us back on utility power yesterday, but it was raining, so this morning, we did the cut-over, slapped in the electric meter, and I’m sitting here, the lights are on, and for the first time in two weeks, there’s no generator running.

One more step to normalcy.

And last night, two more of my technicians had power restored to THEIR houses. Only one left homeless is my nephew. His house was subjected to flooding from the storm surge. Don’t know when he’s gonna get moved back in, if at all…