Power went off last night and we got left in the dark. Walking outside we could see lights around us so off I went to follow the power lines to the village. Things looked good all the way to the transformer and I noticed part of the village was dark. One of the local guys I knew walked out from his shop to see what I was up to and I told him we had no power. Looking at the transformer pole, we see that one of the 240 volt distribution circuit breakers was hanging free after tripping. (The HV primary breakers were fine.) Back in the west you would call the power company, but heh, this is Thailand. My friend grabs a bamboo pole and I hold the flashlight beam on the hanging breaker. He tries a few times, sparks fly, but it doesn't hold. I've done this working for a power company before and wanted to give it a shot, but the support arm the breakers were mounted on would shake like crazy with just a little pressure. I figured if I gave it a strong quick push like it needed to seat that the whole arm would bust off. Wondered also about the insulating properties of a bamboo pole picked off the wet ground! I passed. After a better pole and a few more attempts, the thing finally stayed seated. Lights back on....life and limb risked, electrical infrastructure hanging by a thread, but all is situation-normal again.

Wait a few years until the greenies have had their wicked way with all of us.

You'll have to repair your solar panels by yourself, as the big power generation companies have gone to the wall.

Your hot water will also come from a roof-top solar heater.

Your 86-year-old grannie will have to whip out her tool-box, scramble over the roof and repair each and every minor fault, because service personnel are just too expensive for the average Joe.

But that's only a minor problem.

The dust-storms circling the planet, with no forests left to break them up and hold the dust down, will have raised the temperature of the planet by an average ten degrees, with SE Asia now reaching 45-50 degrees Celsius for six months of the year.

With the lack of carbon dioxide in the air, it is the grain stock as well as the forests suffering, thus the rice crop is scarcely enough to feed the farmers and their families - nothing for city folk or for export.

In the UK we have already seen the first of the windmills fall over in an average wind, with minor gusts. As they age this will happen more frequently, as maintenance costs rise rapidly, and economies have to be made.

Separate generation by each house will impoverish the distribution network and, as in your post, amateur repairs will become the norm.

It will take a century to get back to sanity and the use of nuclear and fossil fuels for the two billion humans surviving at that time.

Different prognosis.

Man living in tree.

This has to be the fastest moving thread ever to be able to get from a power outage to a man living in a tree! Only two replies.....

It's Bedlam.

And weird posters.

Mad Max tine.

Reminds me of the first time in Phuket many years ago, sitting at one of the bars on Banglah road with a few of my mates, pissing down rain......Blackout!

All the usual screams and whoo hoo's and total darkness for 10 minutes.

Then this torch is bobbing down the road, stops, a minute later.....a big flash of sparks and the lights come back on. What we then see is this guy up a bamboo ladder in flip-flops at the junction box, surrounded by a cobweb of wires and his mate on the ground holding the ladder for him......glad to see some OH&S.

At the time we could just not believe what we witnessed, for me now it's just normal.

My best power outage story:

Power goes out in our restaurant, full of people. Dear Hubby climbs up to check the box and opens it to find a gecko inside that had short circuited things.

He says out loud "oh its a gecko". An English girl in the restaurant asks "Is the gecko ok?" a few laughs and hubby says "No, he's toast".

Several years ago my laundry machine failed power-wise, no lights, nothing. Wifey at the time said she would get 'a man' to come and look at it, at a cost of maybe 500B, when I enquired.

"Sod that" thought I and grabbed a screwdriver, opened the plastic panel and found a gecko had chewed through a power cable, it was far too late for him, I asked wifey what the Thai for electricians tape was, was slightly surprised when she said "Sacotch Tape See Dam" ..... no, it can't be that easy, hopped on the bike to the local shop that sells everything and asked for Sacotch Tape See Dam, 20B and ten minutes later, job done.

I am currently in the Philippines - too cold in the UK - and all my chargers (computer, mobile phone, shaver, electric toothbrush, ...) are three-pin UK style.

Power outlets here are all itsy-bitsy two prong US style. Luckily I bought some adapters some time ago, but there does not appear to be any earth (ground) so I do have concerns.

Otherwise, Philippine power networks are very much like Bangladeshi wiring - un-f***-believable!

I'll be in Hong Kong for CNY, so a quick Kung Hei Fat Choi to you all!

I'm afraid to use our house telephone. We have a two kilometer run to the main phone junction box and the phone line is wrapped along the power lines. Sometimes the neutral, sometimes the hot wire..... You would never see that in the west. All it takes is bit of breakdown in the insulation or a bit of high voltage during a thunderstorm causing a carbon path and the phone will be hot. Yikes.

On another note, I did my 90 day check in this morning. At 9:00 AM I could not even get in the building it was so crowded. Came back at 10:30 and walked right up to the desk and the nice girl gave me a queue number that should have been my first clue that something was not right. Sat down for 15 minutes and noticed that the queue numbers, (sitting at 532 for check ins) were not moving on the sign. Walked up to the desk and five minutes later had my check in done and the queue number sign was still at 532. My queue number? 555. Guess the joke was on me....

We had a lightning strike on our phone line. Fried the fax machine, telephone, the modem and the computer the modem was plugged into and the printer that was plugged into the computer. We didn't have the phone line plugged into the UPS because it slowed it down too much.

I never talk on a landline in a lightning storm anymore

Out of my main box, short circuit. Tookay was saved, snake stunk to high heaven.

Out of my main box, short circuit. Tookay was saved, snake stunk to high heaven.

Saved for dinner? Quite surprising a snake is a good enough conductor to blow your breaker!

Out of my main box, short circuit. Tookay was saved, snake stunk to high heaven.

Saved for dinner? Quite surprising a snake is a good enough conductor to blow your breaker!

It stank to high heaven. You can see it's been cooked lol. Called the tookay Lucky, still lives around that box I think.