More Power to Me

Emergency Contact and I recently moved into a new house. New to us, one-hundred-and-ten-years-old to Sydney. The change from living in a flat is quite stark. I wasn’t happy with what the guttering was doing in the rain last night and made a mental note to make it the strata management's problem… 

There are upsides to living in a free-standing house and I’ll let you know when I come across them. But, in the meantime, my house is determined not to let me finish reading my book.

After the chores are done and Darth Baby placed in his chamber, I like to climb into bed and read a book, or latterly, kill the zombies with the plants – but the house has other ideas. I read my books electronically and the house does not charge iPads or iPhones. Weird, huh? Let me explain.

The building inspection did warn us in fairly definite language that the wiring in the place was a little substandard. I think I remember seeing the words “dire”, “cataclysmic”, “abysmal”, “rudimentary”, “Neolithic”, “foolhardy” and “laughable”. Suffice to say, we knew the house needed a little money spent on the wiring.

I insured home and contents and moved in with Emergency Contact and a toddler, anyway. (To those that know EC, it’s hard to gauge who of the two is more dangerous in certain situations.) The plan was to gently ramp up the demands on the electrical wiring until we saw the upper load point and then I’d know what we were working with. It went the other way and we've found our low point.

As many people know but few are ready to admit, electricity is borderline dark magic and no-one really knows how it works. Sure, there are sparkies and electrical engineers who will make bold and baseless proclamations about harnessing it and charge you like any other high-priest of a forbidden sect for their “expertise” but deep down, I’m pretty sure they know it’s all just luck and insulation. Even the fact that they named positive and negative the wrong way round tells me how circumstantial the whole thing is. I’ve owned cars at which auto-electricians have thrown their hands in the air and said, “Don’t understand how this car is running, mate.”

So, our house can simultaneously run a washing machine, dishwasher, lights, hot water, fridge, stove, oven, central air, lamps, large flat-screen TV, DVD/Blu Ray player, home theatre, PlayStation, PC, curling iron, clothing iron, and sundry other bare necessities but it cannot charge an iPad. In fact, it sucks the electricity out of an iDevice. I left a pad plugged in overnight and it was so depleted the next morning it weighed less and it took three hours of charging at work before I could even turn it on.

The answer? I’ve put our iThings on the floor because everybody knows it’s easier for things to run downhill. That’s why lighthouses are constructed at sea-level.

Now, if I could only get Darth Baby to stop sucking them.

(Perfectly reasonable explanation to tell the coroner, too.)