Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with outage

Heatless in Seattle

mumstheword — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:59:22 -0800

Looking for community shelter in case of power outage in Greenlake/Ravenna area of Seattle this weekend. My daughter and I have been googling and can't locate info on community shelter resources in her area--Greenlake, Seattle in the event of a prolonged winter-storm-related power outage this weekend. In the past we brought her to our place in our 4-wheeler as we had natural gas and her only source of heat is electric. But we've moved out of state, her car isn't equipped to drive on the ice sheets that the streets are there right now, and we're trying to find a place in that area she could walk to with her older diabetic kitty. Churches, libraries, community centers? I've spent a lot of time on the dot gov websites, checked the Red Cross, the Seattle City Light sites--lots about how to treat hypothermia, and have candles on hand, but no info on where to go if one just can't stay warm. One idea is to just run the car to stay warm, but not sure how well that will work over a prolonged period. Any concrete info you can share?

Igby Goes Down, And It Costs Him

scrump — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:11:49 -0800

Apropos of today's Amazon.com outage: how much, in dollars per second, does an outage cost a company like Amazon.com?

Targeted power outage

NinaLee — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 04:47:55 -0800

We had a severe thunderstorm yesterday evening where we live in northern Virginia, and later the lights would not work in the bathrooms. The power in the rest of the house works normally. At no time during the storm did the lights even blink. Afterwards, when I checked, the circuit breakers were all in the "on" position. I tried switching them on and off but to no avail. We live in a townhouse that was built in 1976. I'm wondering if there's any kind of quick fix I could do before having to call a professional.

What is this electrical panel thing in my kitchen wall?

potsmokinghippieoverlord — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:54:38 -0800

ElectricalFilter -- please help me identify this mystery panel in the wall of my old apartment! Background: I live in an old apartment -- I think it was built in the twenties. I've been having random power cuts -- the refrigerator stays on, but no other power is available.

I replaced the fuses, and that helped for about a week, but now I'm back to a working refrigerator and no lights, TV, etc. Grr.

Underneath the fuse box, in the kitchen wall next to the refrigerator, is this metal box set into the wall. It has a cover.

When I open the cover, I see the following (and please forgive the bad photography -- it's hard to take a pic leaning over the top of the refrigerator, and the only light I had was a flashlight):

interior of mystery box

top portion of interior of box

detail of top portion of mystery box

Detail of bottom portion of mystery box inverted

What I can read in the top portion pic is
"SWITCH O(illegible)" and then
"PUSH IN
QUICKLY UNTIL
(illegible)"

and in the inverted detail pic

"PULL OUT
(illegible)LY AND P(illegible)
BACKWARD"

wtf is this thing, and is it causing my power to go out randomly? (The apartment next to me has a similar "mystery panel" but no fuse box.)

What's going on with plastic.com?

jwest — Tue, 09 May 2006 09:45:49 -0800

Anybody know what's happened to plastic.com? I haven't been able to get to it in over a week. Is the site down? Anyone know what the story is?

Internet pipes are down

rolypolyman — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 14:07:45 -0800

Is there a major Internet backbone down somewhere? And how can we check it? I notice Dreamhost is inaccessible. Doing a tracert via my ISP, and using the tools at all-nettools.com, tracert.com, etc, neither can even get onto a backbone. Is a chunk of the nation out right now?

Internet connection out after storm..

phox — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 15:55:42 -0800

We had a power outage, now one computer on my network cannot connect to the internet. What happened? I tried changing the cables, the ports it uses on the router, power cycling the cable modem, resetting the router, reinstalling the NIC drivers, restoring windows to a previous date, starting in safe mode with networking... the weird thing is, I can ping sites from a command prompt. I can't connect using IE, Firefox, MSN, AIM, Outlook or anything else. My next step, I figure, is either reformatting or getting a new ethernet card.

Anyone have any ideas to what I could be missing?

Help me get my Dell to work with certain connection types again.

moonbird — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 07:11:51 -0800

My wonderful Dell has a quirk: suddenly streaming media, antivirus updates, and MSN messenger are no longer able to connect. My netwrok settings 'seem' okey-dokey, so short of a long ass tech support call to India*, what gives?
*Not that I have any misgivings about that fabulous region.