ET's Info-Stew

We went to the movies on Friday with Liz and Cy to go see the new Batman movie. When we got out of the theater it was evident that it had just rained. When we got home we were surprised to hear, through the garage door, our fire alarms blaring! Afraid of what we might find, I carefully opened the door...but there was no indication of a fire. We checked the whole house, including the crawlspace and attic, but there was not sign of a fire.

Okay, so then we had to figure out how to turn off the fire alarms. There are seven in the house and all are connected so that if one goes off, they all do. It's extremely loud, and for some reason the "silence alarm" button on the sensor had no effect. Then we noticed something strange: the microwave clock was blinking, as if it had temporarily lost power. I though maybe that was the problem. So I went outside to the power panel, saw that everything was turned on, but cycled all the switches just to make sure. Going back inside, the alarms were still blaring.

At this point I had no idea why the alarms were going off and, worse, no idea how to silence them. I asked Cy and he thought they were possibly detecting something else, like carbon-monoxide. I called my realtor, and her husband told me that he had no idea what might be going on. He thought the cause might be a power failure caused by a nearby lightning strike, but that doesn't necessarily explain why the alarms were sounding. He told me that I should contact the non-emergency number of the fire department if I couldn't figure it out.

Cy tried to help me find the non-emergency number, but all the numbers he was able to find turned out to be numbers for administrative offices, which were closed because it was after hours. So, I ended up calling 9-1-1.

The first words out of my mouth were, "I do not have an emergency". I asked to connect to the non-emergency number for the Cunningham Fire Protection District. The operator obliged, but somehow ended up connecting me to the emergency number. So I repeated that I did not have an emergency, that our fire alarms were going off without any indication of a fire, and that we had no idea how to turn them off. She said she would sent someone out to help.

A few minutes later, standing outside, we started to hear sirens, getting steadily closer. Oh boy! Maybe the firemen were bored, I don't know, but I thought I had made it clear that such a response was unnecessary. We showed two firemen inside, in less than a minute they knew that our system needed to be reset and that they really had no way to help. One of the sensors must have sensed smoke and set off the alarm. They said that we need to remove all the alarms from their wire connections, take out the batteries, wait for an hour, spray the alarms with canned air to clean them out, replace the batteries, and put them back up. Then they left.

After we took care of the noise, we went around and tried to see what might have happened with the power. We tested all the lights, appliances, and outlets, and they were operating just fine. But when we tested the electronics, some of them weren't turning on. I had a power strip in the family room that held all the television equipment, and some of it wasn't working. And there were some things upstairs that also weren't working.

We estimate that we must have had a big power surge. Coupled with the fact that our alarms detected smoke, we think that our house was actually struck by lightning!!! In all, we lost our two televisions, the cable receiver, the DVD recorder, our new Wii gaming console (still under warranty, whew!), and the power adapter to Jenny's laptop. The computers were all fine thanks to using a higher quality surge protector. I learned the hard way that, in a lightning prone area, good surge protectors are VERY important.

It's a good thing we weren't home when the lightning struck, or we could have been hurt (or worse). We are out several hundred dollars in electronics, but it could have been much worse. Along with Thursday's car annoyances, this makes two days of bad luck. Some people say bad things come in threes. Let's hope that isn't the case for us.