Electrical Issues

This last Thursday, we dealt with a scary electrical issue in our house...

I woke to the horrific smell of burning electrical wires. Blake wasn't home yet from work and his men's cell group. It took me some time to realize what was actual happening. It wasn't until I turned on the light in the bathroom and the light bulbs popped out that I began to take the smell seriously. I started to unplug things in the rooms. However, the more appliances I unplugged, the more electricity began surging through the remaining appliances yet to be unplugged. One of our lamps in our bedroom turned on and the light bulbs blew out. I went in to Evie's room to check on her and realized that her space heater was WAY too hot. I hate space heaters to begin with, and they are supposed to have a built-in safety that turns the heater off if it gets too hot. It failed to do so and luckily I was able to get to it and unplug it before anything happened. Evie was pretty scared, obviously, and was even more frightened as the light bulbs in the house kept 'popping' out. I ran outside as fast as I could and flipped all the breakers off so there wouldn't be any more electricity surging through the house.

Blake got home and we ended up calling the fire department since we had no idea where the 'hot spot' in the house was, or what was causing the problem. Evie enjoyed watching two fire engines, sirens and all, drive up to our house. About ten firefighters spent over an hour searching our house for any electrical problems (sparking, hot spots, smoke, etc.). They were only able to find one hot spot with a transistor box under our house. About half of our appliances in the house were no longer working, including our fridge, oven and living room electronics. Finally, an electrician was able to come and figure out where the wires had begun to fry. He fixed the issues and currently the electricity is in working order.

I hesitate to say that I am completely confident in the wiring system in this old house. Part of the huge problem was that this house is wired on one system that connects from room to room, then back again. The first failure was that the breaker failed to shut off the electricity when the wires began to burn. The second was that, due to failure of the breaker, all the electricity surged from room to room before I was able to manually shut off the breakers. This resulted in the loss of many electronics in our house. Most importantly, our computer's power supply unit was completely destroyed. The smell that had woken me up was our computer frying. However, we finally have that fixed. We had to buy a new power supply unit, which Blake successfully installed, new speakers, and we had to install a new cable modem. All were destroyed, including a lamp, Evie's baby monitor system, and a CD player/alarm clock.

However, this whole situation has really caused me to stop and evaluate some things. I realize that it could have been SO much more devastating. Evie and I could have been trapped upstairs if a fire had started. Or we could have lost the house and all of our belongings. I could live without our 'stuff'. In fact, thinking over everything that happened, the only thing in our entire house of 'stuff' that I would have tried to save was Evie. That's it. I don't have an ounce of 'worth' in any of the things we own. I could live without it all. It's Evie and Blake that matter. The Lord will provide our every need and this electrical issue has been a blessing in disguise, helping to wake me up to see that EVERYTHING I have is blessing from the Lord.

;Heather