App-magheddon

Gimme knobs and dials

We’ve just had Storm Darragh tear a bit of a swathe across the western side of the UK. It’s caused quite a bit of damage, some poor fellow was killed by a falling tree, people’s houses have been damaged, loads of flooding, proper scary winds which we don’t get that often.

Well we didn’t get them often, maybe now we do. Anyway, thankfully my local area has been spared serious damage. Two roads blocked nearby by fallen trees but thankfully, as far as I know, no one hurt.

We did have a power cut for a few moments, but they happen quite regularly in this valley, we have a very old wibbly grid connection. Whatever, I didn’t notice because I have batteries and a gateway device which means I don’t know when there are power cuts. I still have power.

Virtue signalling and showing off, storm proof baby….. at least that’s what I thought.

The power was only off in our local area for a few minutes anyway, but down the lane, where the cabinet for our spur of the local fibre optic network also lost power, for 24 plus hours.

The result?

No one in the surrounding area has any kind of internet connection, and because of our location, we don’t have a cell phone signal ever. Nothing. No contact with the outside world. No radio, no TV (we don’t have satellite or old school TV aerial, internet only TV) , no podcast updates, no phone, no email, no social media, no messaging. Nothing. Just spooky silence.

My wife is working in London so she’s avoided this vacuum of utter 21st century horror, but I can state right now, a total loss of connectivity makes a bit of an impact. I went to bed early and read a book.

It was SO nice.

That’s what I used to do all the time. I didn’t watch TV for decades back in my youth, I didn’t have a TV for many years. I read books and went to the cinema with my mates.

Early this morning I walked just over a mile up a nearby hill because I know you can get a phone signal up there. I was not alone, half a dozen people from the village with their many dogs were already there. It was a bit of a community event, everyone holding up their phone to try and get a very weak signal. I sent a couple of texts and came back home.

It was then I realised how utterly reliant I was on my broadband, not for social media, radio, TV or podcast recording. No, it was all the tech in my house. The Tepeo central heating system, the Mixergy hot water system, the powerwall batteries, the solar system, the car chargers, everything that makes this house tick is controlled by apps. Apps that need a constant connection.

Talk about first world problems.

No, literally, that’s what I’m talking about. If your house has been washed away, or bombed to smithereens and you’ve lost half your family and your livelihood, having a ultra high speed, fibre to the door connection is probs not at the top of your ‘must have’ list.

But all that aside, this is the first time I’ve experienced a proper, 24+ hour connection outage. When I was at the top of the hill I got a text message from my broadband provider.

“Due to Storm Darragh, the area powering the cabinet serving your community is experiencing a prolonged power outage. We are aware of the issue and are awaiting action from the power company before we can restore service. Thank you for your patience, and we apologise for the disruption.”

We weren’t having a power cut in the village, this cabinet could be 20 or 50 miles away, news reports are suggesting there is still a huge area of the UK without power.

I was fine for goodness sake, it was only the lack of control over the slightly complex home automation and energy system I’ve built up over the last 20 years that threw me. I have apps for everything, they all have different passwords, they all annoy me in one way or another but they are all very useful.

I had no idea what was going on. Were the batteries full, did they charge in the night, how much hot water did I have, can I turn on the heating? I suddenly longed for analogue, I imagined a big, ugly grey steel electronic control panel on the wall of the kitchen.

Like something you’d see in a 1950’s nuclear power station. Massive bakelite knobs with 3 settings for the battery.

Off - charging - discharging.

Easy to use, easy to see what setting you’d chosen. Maybe an old analogue meter with a needle showing level of charge in the battery.

Same for water, central heating, solar. Big knobs, big lights above, three of them. Green for everything is fine, yellow warning and red, run for it. I would love something like this in the kitchen, I then considered my long suffering wife’s reaction to such a big, ugly lump of dated technology in the kitchen.

Okay, forget that, next.

Thankfully the car was 3/4 full, I drove to the local shop to get provisions, I had the radio on. Assad had fled Syria to stay with his lovely pals in Moscow. It was actual news, I hadn’t heard anything about it. Very dramatic.

The shop was quite busy, Hilda behind the counter was explaining they’d had the power off all night, so we were very lucky just 5 miles up the road.

“I feel sorry for all the people with electric cars.” she said, I overheard this as I perused the chiller cabinets. When I went to the counter to pay I said “I’ve just driven here in an electric car and I’m okay.”

“Oh, so how did you charge it up?” Hilda asked.

“I plugged it in, a couple of days ago. I’ve only used it locally.” Hilda was nodding as she scanned barcodes. I decided to carry on. “I feel sorry for all the people with petrol cars, they can’t fill them, the petrol pumps won’t work if there’s no electricity, it must be awful.”

“I’ve never thought of that.” said Hilda. “That’s very true.” Just another chip away at the daft negative stories pumped out by the fossil lobby.

By the time I’d got back from the shops, the connection was working again and life immediately returned to normal. And it was quite dull.