After a stressful week, things were restored to normal late yesterday afternoon. Monday's lightning hit ended up costing over $2,600 to repair. Most of that cost was the air conditioning repair. Insurance already cut a check, but that's after the $1,000 deductible, so that's not exactly ideal.
On the stress side, we ended up sleeping downstairs on couches and a kids' Ikea mattress, because the upstairs was over 80 degrees. Every morning, I woke up with stuff hurting more than the day before, so that was not ideal. Also stressful, the metering mechanism in our power gateway, which determines how to distribute power with our solar and backup, was dead, meaning that in the event of a power outage, we couldn't run off of the battery and disconnect from the grid. With a hurricane on the way, you can understand why that's bad news. Tesla is completely fucking terrible at supporting their energy products, as I've said before, so after I finally convinced them to send a guy out, he came and went in the morning and didn't fix the problem. The service request didn't even detail the problem, so as far as he was concerned, it was working. I had to call scheduling to convince them otherwise. Anyway, we're back up, ready to go if the power goes out. We can't run the high voltage stuff, like the AC or oven, but we'll have lights and a cold fridge.
On a happier note, I posted on the Twitter the scorch marks inside the Nest thermostat base, and the Google reached out to me. They asked me to send in the serial numbers of my fried thermostats, and they sent me new ones, even though they were certainly out of warranty and destroyed by an "act of god" anyway. That's pretty great of them. Of course, they also know we're good customers, with five of their phones in the last four years, five Google Home speakers, two Nests and a Chromecast, so it wasn't bullshit when their email said, "Since you're a valued customer."
Now we sit around and wait through the long weekend for Dorian to roll in. Regardless of its eventual track, which keeps changing, the consistent forecast for Orlando proper is winds in the low 70 mph range. Because we're inland, it's not likely to go higher than that, but I guess it could go lower if the storm weakens. I expect it to be a lot like Irma almost two years ago. As long as nothing gets airborne and hits the house, we should be fine. I imagine we'll get some water intrusion here and there, but we'll see.
What I don't understand is the way people this far inland react. Everyone is so concerned with having a tank of gas and weeks worth of food, as if the storm will cause massive delays to getting stuff here. The gas in particular I don't understand, because you're not going to be driving anywhere for at least 36 hours, and even then, you're not going to go 300 miles to anywhere.
We have a little extra water, stockpiled some ice, not fundamentally changed our food stock, have adequate propane for cooking, and we'll fill the bath tub for flushing if we lose pressure. We also have a lot of liquor. What does suck about hurricane insurance is that the deductible is huge, but it's intended to cover the catastrophic scenario.
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