No lights for me

Published on 5 December 2006 in ,

I’m sat here typing this in relative gloom. There’s a reason for this. This evening I came home, turned on the kitchen lights and ZAP! Darkness descended.

The fuse for the light circuit in the fuse box appears to have blown. Groping around in a darkened room, I finally found the torch and set about opening up the fuse box – cursing as I walking back up two flights of stairs in the dark because I’d forgotten to bring a screwdriver.

Opening up the fuse box, I found that my fuse box doesn’t take wire – it takes cartridge fuses. The 5A one I required looked suspiciously like a standard 5A fuse so I wandered off to Homebase to pick some up.

I got back home to learn something new. You don’t use standard 5A fuses in a fuse box. Nope. The fuse box variety are shorter.

However this leads to a second question – where on earth do you get such fuses? Neither Homebase nor Wickes had anything other than standard fuses and fuse wire, hence why I’m sat here in comparative gloom. We have only four lamps, so one is the living room, another in the kitchen and one each for the bedrooms (one of which I’m typing this in).

So tomorrow I’m going to have to go fuse hunting. Checking online, it looks like Maplin has the kind I need. I can only hope they are the right ones when I pop by tomorrow. Until then, it’s lamps and candles all the way.

To add to the fun, I had a small filling in my teeth this evening, but it’s not been ground down enough meaning that I feel like I now have a boulder as a tooth…

Still, at least the rest of the electrical equipment still works…