The back porch had water flowing like the Mississippi during the storm. Emma stood at the back door and watched for a half hour. I hadn't yet cleaned out the gutters, water was just pouring into the carport and into the shed. There is something I like about the smell of wet sawdust, but the water really was everywhere.
I left for Stake meetings at 5pm, Tara went to her Mom's place. When I got home at 10:30, I expected Tara to be watching basketball, but she was reading a book. It turned out that the TV, phone and internet were all down.
I went out to the shed, where the switch is that does the fiber to ethernet conversion. The thing has a UPS backup to it so that the phone line will work in a power outage. The UPS unit was dark. Everything was wet, water had been pouring down the wall. I took a lamp out, the electrical socket had juice.
We had an older little UPS from when we had Comcast phone service, I pulled it off the wall in the laundry room and took it out there, but the newer UPS had a different connector. I thought for a minute about splicing the thing together, but the phrase "I void warranties" kept coming into my head, so I held off.
I turned on a space heater and stuck it up by the UPS, 2 hours later, when I plugged the UPS into the wall, the thing crackled, but didn't power on. I left it overnight, and this morning when I plugged it in, it powered right back up. When the switch powered on, we got TV, phone and cable back.
I'm a little surprised that the thing came back on, really, but APC makes good products. I wouldn't go throwing a bucket of water on it, and I need to do something to make sure the water doesn't do that again, but I was impressed that it came back on...
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