Power Fail

I have told most of my fellow Floridians that it is super windy here. Like the type of wind that would cancel school back home, yet the Scottish take it in stride. Luckily, unlike Florida, the powerlines here are mostly underground, so we never lose power during the storms.  This weekend, however, when Pedro went to turn on the lights, it tripped the breaker.  It was late, so we were in total darkness too. All the sockets in the house were still working, but none of the light switches. We go downstairs, where our breaker is kept in a cabinet under a table by the front door, to see the damage. We thought it'd be a simple flip of the switch, and we'd be back to light. Silly Americans! 

No designated switches for different parts of the house, just the main and optional timers. After all the dumb "turn it off and back on" trials, Pedro gave up and resigned to texting the landlord in the morning. But having an IT/engineer/carpenter/virtuoso step-dad, he was my first thought for a call for help. I figure he may have seen some foreign breakers in his career and could give some advice.  Unfortunately, once I uncovered the breaker, we saw this was foreign even to him, and a video chat in the dark didn't help much. But I learned not to mess with it since it's packing a lot more heat than the American ones. I resigned to leave it to the landlord too, but I wanted to know how this one worked, so I hit up Google.

With what I found, it's not totally our fault we didn't know what the heck was going on. When I found a thumbnail picture similar to ours, I found a video detailing all the different breakers in the UK, citing ours as the oldest and least recommended. Great!  The reason being - no fault protection. Instead of switches, we have fuses, and the wires from the fuses can poke out or fray and cause all kinds of problems. (Kind of like finding out that you have the dreaded knob-and-tube wiring in your house) The video went on to say that if it's blown, you have to replace the wire within the fuse or replace the whole fuse. Either way, I knew I wasn't touching it. 

The next day, the landlord responded pretty quickly by sending out the maintenance guy that afternoon. We told him the issue with the lights and that we no experience with how to deal with this type of breaker.  I'm sure at this point he was thinking 'silly Americans' too, but I thought, 'just wait'.

*opens up breaker cabinet*

Maintenance guy: Oh, for f**** sake!

*Pedro and I trying to hold in our laughter upstairs*

Needless to say, he wasn't too happy with the choice of breakers either (not the first time he's found something really old in the apartment). But he switched out the wires and we had our lights again!