Very strange power outage

[one_cat]

We had a power outage on Friday night, noticed on Saturday morning, blinking clocks etc. The normal stuff. The first note of strangeness we found was when we looked at the clock on DW's nightstand. It wasn't blinking. Instead it was displaying wierd characters in place of the numbers. We tried to reset it to no avail. In addition the radio was on. We tried to turn it off with the switch but it wouldn't go off. We had to unplug the clock to reset it so we could set the time and turn off the radio. As we went around the house resetting appliances we noticed that the vcr in the living room had the same problem. We had to unplug it to reset the clock. The receiver had to be turned off (luckily we didn't have to unplug it) in order to turn it off sleep mode. The router and hub in our basement had to be power recycled to get them off fault-mode. The strangest of all was the adding machine on the desk in the office. It also had strange characters on the screen. I tried to turn it off. It wouldn't turn off. I mean come on - it's a MECHANICAL switch. When I turned the switch to off the adding machine stayed on. I had to unplug it to turn it off. When I plugged it back in it was normal again. Is that not the strangest thing? Nothing seems to have been permanently hurt but we felt like we were in the twilight zone for awhile.

Anyone know what kind of power outage would cause these kinds of problems?

 

[WillyJ]

No One-cat, can't say that I've heard of anything like that before!!! Very strange!!!????

 

[mamajoan]

CREEPY.. VERY CREEPY!

sure does sound odd, hope whatever it was does not happen again!

 

[MarkRG]

Sounds like you had a very nasty spike either when the power dropped or came back up. It can bridge contacts in switches and cause the kind of things you're describing. Possibly a lighning strike. You're lucky it happened overnight, such things have been known to cause electric powered items to explode.

Did you have surge supressors on any of the items? If you do you'll need to replace them. They are one-shot items, and not good for protection a second time. If not, you should really get some, especially for sensitive items like the hub/router. They even make inexpensive little cube type ones for things like the calculator.