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So, several people have asked what happened at our house on Tuesday morning. Here's the low down:
Emily had an appointment at Gillette for her annual evaluation with Dr. Tervo, the pediatric neurologist on Tuesday morning at 8:45am. I planned to go to the appointment and then work from home for the rest of the day. On Monday night, Louie was complaining that he was hot and his tummy hurt. We were eating dinner and he got down and went to the living room. He started making these weird noises, Dan said "oh, he's been making sick sounding noises lately." But, I had a feeling. I went to the LR to find him throwing up all over the floor. He was feeling better on Tuesday morning, but I really didn't think it was a good idea to bring a kid that was sick the night before to Gillette and spread the joy to the patients there.
So, Dan was getting ready to go, I was in Louie's room getting laundry organized and I heard a really loud pop and buzzing sound. All the lights in the house went out. I went to the back room where the circuit box is and smelled this horrible smell. I opened up the closet and the smell was really bad. I quickly called Lynch's house to see if they could recommend an electrician to come and take a look. I called Xcel energy to see if there was anything weird on their end. No, but when I said that it smelled weird, they sent someone out immediately.
Dan left with Louie and Emily. He dropped Lou off at Lynch's house and went to Gillette with Emily.
Mark from Highland Electric showed up and so did someone from Xcel Energy. The immediately turned all power to our house at the meter outside. They came in and looked. The main breaker had tripped, but upon further investigation, it tripped because there was a short between one of the circuit breakers and the main breaker. It melted the main breaker to the electrical panel and thus caused the trip. Both the Xcel guy and Mark, the electrician said that we are very lucky we were home. If we had not been home, we surely would have returned to house that was burned to the ground as the current was still coming in from the meter and that could have continued to melt the panel more and cause a fire.
Thankfully, I was home. Dan couldn't smell a thing??? and had I not mentioned that I smelled something weird, Xcel or the electrician wouldn't have been to our house in 15 minutes and shut everything down.
The root of the problem is that when the house was rewired in 1997, the electrician at the time used aluminum wiring in the circuit box rather than copper. It isn't as durable as copper. It became loose in the connection and thus caused the problem.
There you have it. We now have a new panel and all new circuits in our house.
We all spent the day at Lynch's house on Tuesday as they had to shut down power to our house for several hours to get everthing repaired and install a new circuit panel.
We are sooooo thankful that we were home at the time, had it been 15 minutes later, we would not have been.