And the power went out

Yesterday was a stinking hot day, and while cloud cover meant it didn't quite get to 40C, the wind was gusting, exactly the sort of weather in which a minor grass fire turns into a major bushfire in the blink of an eye.

While there have been some very bad bushfires around Victoria we were unaffected with no fire close enough to worry about.

So, after my morning at the Athenaeum, we stayed inside with the aircon running - we run ours at 26C, enough to keep the house comfortable rather than office temperatures - and kept the cats inside as, silly creatures, they will go and bake themselves stupid in the heat.

It was beginning to look as if we were going to get away without anything major, when, just before five o'clock in the afternoon, the power went out.

Where we live in rural north east Victoria, power outages are a fact of life. Late autumn and winter storms usually mean two or three outages a year, plus the occasional blip, wobble and drop out during bad weather.

We are all electric. When we moved here ten years ago we did have a bottled gas stove top, but we replaced it with an induction hob when we remodelled the kitchen.

But being all electric hasn't been a problem. The house is reasonably well insulated and if it starts to get cold we put on our cold weather gear from when we used to walk and ski in the Australian Alps in winter.

Likewise we still have our little gas camp stove, and we have a gas barbecue, meaning we can make hot drinks, heat up a can or two of soup, and even cook dinner providing the weather's being kind.

What we havn't had is a power outage in the middle of a heatwave.

At first, all we did is simply wait and see if the power came back. 

Ausnet, the company that maintains the poles and wires, didn't help by sending us a text message saying an assessment crew would be with us in 90 minutes time, it would have been better if they said that they had logged a fault in our area and would provide an update in an hour or so.

However, it's J's phone that gets the Ausnet text messages, and it was sitting on 25%. Not ideal, so I grabbed the powerbank I use to power my lightbox out of my work kit to charge it - fortunately it was about 90% charged despite not having been used for a month or two.

We of course had the usual problem of being in a location with crap mobile phone reception, meaning we couldn't use our phones to check what was going on and I could't use our 4G modem to get us a network connection over the cell phone network.

So, I grabbed the old transistor radio out of our emergency box. It's an old type unit, around twenty years old and has an old style rotary tuner.

I, of course, being used to smart speakers, and modern scanning radios had absolutely no clue what frequency our local ABC station was on.

I should probably make up an emergency notebook with key information like the local ABC emergency frequency, but I hadn't, but after a bit of fiddling I found our local ABC station.

The news was apocalyptic. Bushfires everywhere and 96,000 properties had lost power, which was getting on for half of country Victoria.

Clearly we weren't going to get power back anytime soon.

The first problem was dinner.

A total fire ban meant we couldn't use the barbecue or the camping stove, so we made up a salad from a tin of mixed beans, a can of tuna and some veggies. We grabbed a couple of bottles of no alcohol beer from the fridge in the outside studio - we are doing the dry January thing, and anyway it would better to be sober in case things went pearshaped.

By this time the light was beginning to go so we got out our emergency led storm lanterns, turned the radio off and sat in the garden with a couple of cokes and watched the unusually orange sun go down.

Then it was inside to read our kindles for an hour or so - glowing screens are a definite plus compared to earlier kindles with a passive e-ink screen that just used reflected light.

Then to bed after cold showers - the house was growing hotter and the night stickier to try and get some sleep.

It sounds like we were terribly well organised. 

We weren't - we hadn't checked the storm lanterns, the power banks or the emergency radio for ages, normally we only check them in the run up to winter. We were simply lucky that they were well enough charged from the last time I checked them at the end of winter. 

As it was a couple of our torches that we keep to find our way about ideally should have been recharged and our head torches from our walking and camping days could only manage a pathetic glow.

I guess the moral is that we should be a bit more proactive and check our emergency kit every couple of months.

As it was, we did manage to get to sleep and were woken at three in the morning by a great beeping and buzzing as the power came back on and we rejoined the twenty first century.

More important than it seems - while we normally use wifi calling from our phones, we do also have a pseudo landline connection connected into the back or our internet modem. Obviously both the fibre optic transceiver and our internet modem have to have power for it to work, but it does mean we can make an emergency call even if our mobiles are out of power.

So once we had power back, it was a case of turning the cooling back on to cool the house and go back to bed.

This morning it was a case of checking our internet connection, restarting a couple of computers that had become terribly confused, charging the storm lanterns and power banks.

The local supermarket had no fresh bread or orange juice this morning but they'd been able to keep the frozen and chilled cabinets cold with the help of a backup generator, so it was toasted packet bread and long life orange juice for breakfast this morning - very much a first world problem - and I should have picked up some fresh bread and juice yesterday - my bad.

We got off lightly because we'd planned for winter storms and knew what to do, but after the problem with the emergency torches and not knowing the emergency radio frequency I ordered an extra storm lantern and an AM/FM radio that you can pre program favourites - not that the emergency channel is anybody's idea of a fun listen.

The radio I've ordered has an internal battery and charges via USB meaning we can run it and recharge it from one of the powerbanks, or a at a pinch one of the storm lanterns.

But really, we should try and be a bit better prepared ...