Had a spot of bother yesterday which resulted in some unfortunate peak rate usage.
I had an unexpected broadband outage which has shocked me into realising how much we rely on it.
First, I decided to replace my cable modem with the crap Vodafone router as I thought it might need to be in the original configuration if Vodafone wanted to run some diagnostics. Then thought, better turn off my router in case it interferes with it.
Big mistake !
I realised I needed to contact Vodafone but the internets down, so I’ll use the hotspot from my phone. I had to half stick the phone out the window to get a good enough signal. I am now on the ipad trying to login, can’t remember the password, so its back to my desktop to get the password from my vault in the cloud but the desktops not on WiFi. Eventually found the password from an email attachment I had sent myself sometime in the past so I could access it on the ipad.
Logged in and ran a "check my broadband tool". There was an outage in my area with a fix time of mid evening. OK so at least I don’t need to do anything else apart from wait. So I put back my cable modem BUT forgot to switch back on the local router. Having lost local comms, my solar inverters had gone into fallback mode (low power) and worse, my battery inverter had lost comms with the grid point monitor so stopped working altogether. Unfortunately, I had not noticed.
Then for the Octopus saving session at 5pm I forced myself Offgrid which worked fine but when I switched back to the grid after 6pm, I only noticed a couple of hours later that the Sunny Island was not working. Then the penny dropped, I had switched the router off 5 hours ago and not switched it back on.
Another lesson learned.
