Lightning Fried House

Well yesterday was another evening of lightning storm in Kuala Lumpur that is becoming a regular occurrence, courtesy of Ms La Nina or is it Mr El Nino. The thing is when I was thanking my lucky stars that the SMART tunnel was open despite the storm(funny isn't when it was closed for four day for a fiddling shower before this) and I escaped the jam in Jalan Tun Razak, I received a call from the wife saying her mother at our house called to say there was a big lightning strike and that after switching on the ELB there was still no electricity in the house. That got me racing to reach home before the light faded but surprise, surprise there were flash floods everywhere. I thanked my lucky stars for my MPV and managed to wade through certain stretches that allowed me to reroute along a circuitous route to reach my home in about the same time as a normal day. Upon reaching my home, I suspected my main fuse has blown but when the wife called our two electricians on call, one of them said to call the electric company to check it out first before he could do any repairs and the other said he could only come after the rain stops. Since at the time the rain has tapered off, I told him to come asap before the light fades off and electrical supplies stores close and he finally agreed to do so. Upon checking after installing the spare main fuse that I kept, he said that our ELB or regulator was also damaged as it kept tripping even though there was power in the circuit. Thus he had to buy a new ELB and install it and the electricity finally came on. He said it was lucky it was not the regulator as that was one expensive equipment. Anyway the moral of the story is that you need to keep a spare main fuse, that is the one on the left for such emergencies, and also have two electricians on call. This is because until the whole thing was fixed, there was no response from the electric company to say when their people can come to check out the problem. Imagine that my house would still have no electricity if I totally followed the first electricians advise. What chutzpah!

Post Script : I also just found out the lightning strike fried my internal telephone wires so I have to do some re-wiring, not only for the landline but my alarm CMS that taps into the line. This is one expensive lightning strike.