The Magic Phrase is "Flickering Lights"

Well who knew we'd luck out and solve this problem so quickly (I mean, it has been going on for weeks but within about 12 hours of last night's blog post, we had an answer). So first, I have to fill in one detail that I left out last night because I didn't think it was relevant: a couple days into the patio build, we noticed some wires had been cut outside our house, probably by the big truck driving gravel to the back yard. A local electrician came by to make sure it wasn't live and said it was only an old phone line (given what minimal information I know about copper phone lines, this seemed logical).

Still, we had our utility service come out and check the pole as well. We were cleared and good to go--not an electrical issue. This seemed to support the fact that we weren't experiencing any outages (because if an electrical line to your house gets cut, you'd expect to lose power, right?). So we did all our due diligence and it seemed like a non-issue. When our power started acting just a tiny bit weird a couple days later, we honestly figured it couldn't be related, given all the professional opinions. Anyway, thanks to the magic of 20/20 hindsight, it turns out this fact is pretty important. 

After an email to the electrician last night to mention that the situation seemed to have worsened and that now our lights were flickering pretty badly, he agreed to come take another look since it sounded bad. After less than 5 minutes and without him even coming into the house, we had a new diagnosis. He pointed to the pole outside our house. A silver wire was hanging free, right next to the pole (we thought that was just a "support wire" for the power). He said that it was the neutral and it was broken. 

It turns out, if you lose the neutral, the circuit will complete by running through the ground, attached to a water pipe, to a neighbor's house and use THEIR neutral. So that's a LOT more resistance, which means high power appliances like microwaves and dryers will struggle to get enough electricity. He said to call the power company and say we were experiencing flickering lights at the triplex.

When we called to report the problem this time,  we realized that the utility even had a voice prompt for "flickering lights." Apparently that was the word to use--and the word we didn't use three weeks ago when we called them to check on the broken line (because, at the time we weren't experiencing any problems). Needless to say, they were outside our house within a couple of hours.

And lo and behold, full power! Dryer, garbage disposal, microwave, all running at the same time and the office power stayed on! Not to mention the dryer and the microwave sound a lot happier and higher powered.

So we have an unnecessary microwave now, but I guess seven years isn't that crazy for a replacement. Given that the electrician didn't charge us for any of his two house calls, I'd say we came out ahead on this one.