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I recently had my own host of cable internet issues. So about 3 months ago the RJ45 cable in my cable modem melted. I thought it was a freak accident. I checke

I recently had my own host of cable internet issues. So about 3 months ago the RJ45 cable in my cable modem melted. I thought it was a freak accident. I checked all of my networking equipment, checked my outlets, etc. No problems. So I installed a new cable and then everything was fine. Cue 2 weeks ago. Connectivity became intermittent and then finally I had no internet for almost a week. Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month. So I started digging around for the problem. A little over a year ago they sent out techs to work on my neighbors internet and in the process foolishly cut my coax. So I started from the cable tap and worked my way backwards. There wasn't a continuity problem from what I could tell, no one either intentionally or unintentionally cut the cable. Then I look on the back of my house where the coax from the street is bonded to my home's grounding rod. Everything to the right of the bond was completely melted and still super hot. NOT GOOD. So I did some testing of the bonding wire to the ground, the resistance was 37 ohms (should be much less than this). And there were no other electrical problems. My thought at the time was somehow power was being backfed from the cable tap to my home. So I removed the cable from the street and disconnected everything inside that was touch this cable. Almost immediately I start getting voltage drops in my house, can't even run the microwave. That's when I realized what was really going on. The cable line was being used as a return path because the neutral for my neighborhood was at least partially severed. It was so bad that if I increased voltage load in my home past a certain point then the streetlights in the front of my home would completely turn off.. Yes I could turn city infrastructure off and on by toggling the voltage load in my home. The power company within a few hours had a crew come out to diagnose and fix the issue since it's actually potentially dangerous. They confirmed for me it was indeed a bad neutral. As soon as they replaced it I spliced my coax line, reconnected it, and everything worked perfectly.

milankragujevic 6y ago
This is one of the most interesting and intriguing yet improbable stories I have ever read. Thanks for sharing. I had a vanilla problem of power from neighbor's faulty set top box that was backfeeding into the cable network and killed my modem (and I think some other people's) one day. I was told by the ISP's technician what had happened, I assumed the modem died by itself (i.e. bad OS) since it wouldn't fully turn on, only shows the power LED. In reality the tuner and some electronics probably died.
MichaelZuo 6y ago
The electricity neutral for your home used the internet cable line? The amount of macguyvering to get that to work at all in the first place boggles the mind.
- throwanem 6y ago
  It wouldn't be done deliberately. If anything, it's an example of how electricity's invisibility and sometimes very counterintuitive behavior make it never wholly trustworthy, no matter how we've come to rely on it. I wouldn't change that reliance on a bet! Electrical power infrastructure is the most revolutionary human application of energy since the discovery of fire. But, like fire, there's only so far you ever want to trust it.
  - MichaelZuo 6y ago
    I agree that electricity has unintuitive behaviour though it is trustworthy, at least as far as you would trust a water system, if one understands why electricity doesn’t behave the same as water.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      You can see water. It's a lot less potentially lethal, too. I understand how electricity works well enough to handle it safely - and, at least as important, to know when I can't handle it safely and it's time to call in a professional - but that's not the same as trusting it. Honestly, it's a lot more the same as not trusting it. I can and do prototype line-voltage filament LED lamp designs on my bench without a problem, but I think more than anything else it's maintaining a lively awareness of the danger involved that helps there not be a problem. What's really scary is stuff that's as dangerous as those prototypes and doesn't look it - a condition that I think only ionizing radiation excels electricity in making it possible to create. All anyone has to do is screw up wiring an appliance with exposed metal parts, and the whole thing can be live at potentially lethal mains voltage - and I'll freely admit that having had my batteries very unpleasantly charged that way once, thanks to a miswired ceiling fan, strongly informs my perspective on the subject. As with fire, so with electricity: an indispensably useful servant, but also an ineluctably dangerous one, to be regarded with respectful mistrust at all times lest a moment's carelessness end in tragedy.
newsbinator 6y ago
> Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month Is there a good explanation for how this can be the case in a developed country?
- justin66 6y ago
  The invisible hand of the free market did not want anyone there for a month. We all follow the invisible hand (like, instinctively, since it's invisible). You're not questioning the wisdom of the invisible hand, are you?
  - bluGill 6y ago
    you can't blame the free market when comcast has a state sponsored monopoly/duopoly (with the telephone company being the other) on fast internet.
    - justin66 6y ago
      You can blame The High Priests of The Invisible Hand for keeping the members of the duopolies astonishingly poorly regulated, to go back to the original point of the grandparent post. As an aside, it's funny, I'm not sure what qualifies for me as "the telephone company" anymore. I guess there probably is one where I live, technically, but it doesn't seem to factor in. edit: this is evidently going to be one of those posts that fluctuates in "points" over time, bouncing up and down. It'd be fun to have a sparkline implementation that illustrates this change over time
    - hannasanarion 6y ago
      "state sponsored" only in the sense that the state hasn't stepped in to break them up. Comcast's monopoly is entirely self-created through mergers and non-competition agreements.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        No, state sponsored - or more likely city sponsored. If you attempt to run wires around your neighborhood to provide TC, Telephone, and internet (you need to do all 3 to have a chance at making money) you will be shut down because Comcast already as an agreement with the city to not allow anyone else to do it. I'm assuming a serious plan to run wires above. That is you have found deep packet backers to fund you; you have found qualified people to do the work; you have figured out all the other details to do this. There are good reasons to stop someone running cat-6 wires everywhere, but here I'm assuming you have figured out the right way to do this - whatever it is.
aaronmdjones 6y ago
In the UK we call this a PEN conductor fault. It's called a PEN conductor when it's used as a combined Protective Earth & Neutral, as in a TN-C-S earthing arrangement. The property earthing is bonded to the incoming neutral cable before the consumer unit ("fuse board" / breaker panel). This relies on the fact that the neutral side of the supply transformer is itself earthed (this is why it's called neutral; its potential with respect to the earth is ~0V). If the neutral supply to your property is broken, then the return current will pass through the internal neutral wiring in your home, back through any protective devices like breakers and RCDs, and then jump across your earth bond, back through the earth wiring in your home, and then to e.g. a water line or gas line bond, or in your case, coaxial; through the earth itself, and then back to the neutral side of the supply transformer, completing the circuit. This has 3 important implications: 1) The return conductor (e.g. coaxial cable) may not be adequately-sized to carry the current you're asking it to, but your circuit breakers are rated in relation to the fixed internal wiring of your property, so they won't trip. This risks melting and subsequently breaking the conductor, leading to: 2) The exposed metalwork in your house becomes live. Screws at lightswitches, metal ceiling lighting pendants, copper water and gas lines, the works. All of it. This leads to: 3) An RCD (GFCI) or a device that contains an RCD (like an RCBO) will not save you when you come into contact with any of it, because the current is first passing back through that RCD on your internal neutral wiring, so there is no current imbalance from its perspective. So yes, very dangerous. In the UK, we use concentric cabling for our street supplies, so it is very hard to accidentally sever the outer neutral conductor without also severing the inner line conductor.
- yholio 6y ago
  In a properly executed TN-C-S distribution, the TN-C and TN-S sections are separated with a 4 way single junction point where the PEN conductor coming from the station is connected to the local grounding rod and after this the separated PE and Neutral conductors are drawn into the property. Absolutely no circuit breaker is allowed on the PEN conductor upwards of this separation point. This arrangement remains safe regardless of any single fault in any of the 4 wires. If the PEN conductor breaks but the local earthing still has decently low resistance, the internal PE protection that connects to the case of electronic appliances is still connected to the ground. If strong currents are drawn the voltage of the PE in relation to the real ground will increase, but the mains voltage will also fluctuate with the difference; so you might get a 20-30V drop in the mains voltage and the same voltage appears on the PE, not usually dangerous and you can see something is wrong with the power. Differential and overload protections still work since they have a safe return via the grounding rod. If, on the other hand, the local grounding malfunctions, the PE is still secured to the PEN, which should be grounded at the nearest pole or local transformer. This is a harder defect to detect and periodic checks are recommended on the local ground, but at least you have single fault protection, and two things need to happen before a dangerous condition can occur (both local grounding and the PEN conductor must have a fault). An adjacent benefit of having good local grounding in this configuration is cleaner and more stable voltage, since all groundings of all houses in an area are connected in parallel to the same PEN line, providing a path to the ground that might have a lower impedance than the PEN line feeding it.
saltspork 6y ago
Open neutrals are no joke, here’s a good analysis of a similar situation that caused a house fire: https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Open-Neutral/Open-Neutral.html https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Open-Neutral/Open-Neutr... Here in Australia the coax connection from the street typically goes through a galvanic isolator to avoid this situation, rather than being bonded to the earth.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Wow what a mess
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  Open neutrals are no joke but each case does give a good story every time again. I know a guy who cut a 70mm2 neutral in a factory. They had a lot of single phase drive inverters. I think somethink like 25 inverters had to be replaced (and a lot of other stuff too).
- robocat 6y ago
  What do you mean by “galvanic isolator”? Link to coax example device? I’ve never heard the term before and a quick google is showing something irrelevant. NZer, so the language barrier exists!
  - jhiesey 6y ago
    Probably an isolation transformer. A search for “cable tv isolation transformer” gives lots of results.
  - 8bitsrule 6y ago
    Hadn't heard the term before. Looks like its two diodes in parallel, pointing opposite directions, in a very-expensive box. Blocks low-voltage DC flow while allowing higher-voltage AC currents to pass. Looks like maritime usage is common. http://www.yandina.com/galvanicIsolator.htm http://www.yandina.com/galvanicIsolator.htm
mnw21cam 6y ago
A few years back, when we had a load of wet weather, we had a power cut. It lasted about an hour before the power came back on again, only to go off after about 30 seconds. This time it was off for about 5 minutes, then back on for 30 seconds again. On a whim, I wandered down the road. It had stopped raining. About 50m down the road there was a dry patch of pavement and a smell of burning plastic. Another 100m down the road was the electricity substation, with a guy from the electric company who said he was trying yet another 300A fuse. He said that often the cable can be shorted out by ground water, but connecting it up again may heat it enough to drive the water out and make it fine. I asked him after breaking three fuses already, how he thought another one would solve the problem, and would he like to know where the short was? Took a bit of persuading to get him to walk 100m up the road to where the dry patch and smell of burning plastic was, and of course by then the smell had worn off a bit. Another electric company guy arrived with a smelling device, which they bashed into the tarmac to try to identify the location of the break, eventually settling with exactly where I told them it was. Within a couple of hours after that, a team had ripped up the pavement, dug down to the cable, spliced it, wrapped it up in waterproofing, refilled the hole, and relaid the pavement. But I think your story wins.
searchableguy 6y ago
In India, ISPs intentionally cut the cables to annoy competitor's customers. It's insane how many people don't do anything but simply switch while being aware.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  Don't worry, that happens in the US too. Super annoying and dishonest.
  - m463 6y ago
    I've had friend have their lines cut by comcast or ilk. I think it started with old cable systems where people would connect their cable themselves without paying for service. Then when the techs would go to install service they would see if any of the nearby houses were hooked up without being on the customer list, and cut their cable. A friend of mine had her cable cut, probably for the same reason. Unfortunately the cable went to her satellite dish, not comcast. (I guess it could have been competitors too)
smichel17 6y ago
Just FYI, I really enjoyed your story but I almost closed the tab and didn't read it due to "Read on to find out" in the first paragraph. It sets off all the clickbait alarms in my head, which make me expect to find a bunch of low-quality content. The rj45 cable melting is just as good of a hook (and is actually why I continued reading). I'd suggest sticking the first sentence onto the front of the second paragraph and removing the rest of the first paragraph.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Thanks for that feedback. I'm having to do a lot more writing for my job now so being able to improve my writing with honest feedback is super important. I agree, I even cringed a little bit when I wrote it. But I didn't want to fully give everything away so it was just a bad edit :) Your suggestion would work a lot better.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    Be sure to write specifically for your target audience. That clickbait would work if your target was the Lowest Common Denominator. It doesn't work so well with a highly technical audience.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - virgulino 6y ago
    You had me hook, line and sinker at "cable in my cable modem melted". Great story and great writing, thanks!
arnon 6y ago
That's an incredible story! It's amazing what you can discover when you start back-tracing issues like this. A few months ago, my house started having intermittent failures. It turns out that some road works caused one of the phases in my house to leak into the other phase, which caused a whole array of problems, but only in specific areas of the house. We discovered this by piping 40kV into the wiring and listening to crackling in the ground, where we found the faulty cabling.
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  I'm very intrigued--can I get any more details about how you could safely do that? Did you, e.g. disconnect the main breaker and have a spare Van de Graaff generator lying around?
  - arnon 6y ago
    I obviously had help :) I had an electrician come and perform this step. The house was disconnected from the source, and then a "thumper" was used: https://megger.com/portable-fault-location-system-stx40- https://megger.com/portable-fault-location-system-stx40- 2000
  - rosswilson 6y ago
    It's called Insulation Resistance Testing and an electrician would typically use a device like a Megger tester. Here's a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXUuuV4_sw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXUuuV4_sw
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      Oh, of course. I was not thinking right. I was imagining a 'chunky' HV supply rather than a hi-pot tester, like some Stanford Research PSU, but those only went up to a few kV if I'm remembering correctly. Thanks.
S_A_P 6y ago
Being somewhat savvy here probably saved the Comcast tech from severe injury I could imagine them poking around and getting a shocking result.
larrydag 6y ago
Yes. Severed neutral lines are bad. A tree next to the house had eventually worn down the neutral line into our house and severed it. We heard buzzing and saw smoke in the house. Fortunately all the was burnt was an extension bar. It could have been a lot worse.
ineedasername 6y ago
Send Comcast a bill for your services.
jdeibele 6y ago
We were about to leave for vacation in August. The night before we left, the power went off, then came back on. This happened 1, 2, 3, 20 times. I switched off the main breaker and then went outside to see if I could find out what was going on. Nobody was outside and it was hard to tell if other homes had electricity - a lot of people were gone on vacation themselves and it was still bright. I tried calling electricians but couldn't get anybody out quickly enough so I ended up calling the power company. They dispatched a guy with a small truck with a short cherry-picker. He was able to diagnose the problem as branches rubbing on the power line. He trimmed around it so I could turn the power back on. Our house was built in 1914 and the tree wasn't there. Somewhere over 100 years the tree in our neighbor's yard was planted and grew large enough to interfere with the power line. While we were gone the power company replaced the connection with a shorter, more direct line that avoided the tree entirely. As another poster said, I think your story is better because of your diagnosing the problem yourself.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
The more I find out about professional trades involving danger, the more I realize everything is a shit show. As developers we often think our mess is the biggest but let me tell you a story about how Exxon drilled a shallow well on the site of an old refinery to recapture product that was leaking into the soil from rusty pipes.

milankragujevic 6y ago

This is one of the most interesting and intriguing yet improbable stories I have ever read. Thanks for sharing. I had a vanilla problem of power from neighbor's faulty set top box that was backfeeding into the cable network and killed my modem (and I think some other people's) one day. I was told by the ISP's technician what had happened, I assumed the modem died by itself (i.e. bad OS) since it wouldn't fully turn on, only shows the power LED. In reality the tuner and some electronics probably died.

MichaelZuo 6y ago

The electricity neutral for your home used the internet cable line? The amount of macguyvering to get that to work at all in the first place boggles the mind.

throwanem 6y ago
It wouldn't be done deliberately. If anything, it's an example of how electricity's invisibility and sometimes very counterintuitive behavior make it never wholly trustworthy, no matter how we've come to rely on it. I wouldn't change that reliance on a bet! Electrical power infrastructure is the most revolutionary human application of energy since the discovery of fire. But, like fire, there's only so far you ever want to trust it.
- MichaelZuo 6y ago
  I agree that electricity has unintuitive behaviour though it is trustworthy, at least as far as you would trust a water system, if one understands why electricity doesn’t behave the same as water.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    You can see water. It's a lot less potentially lethal, too. I understand how electricity works well enough to handle it safely - and, at least as important, to know when I can't handle it safely and it's time to call in a professional - but that's not the same as trusting it. Honestly, it's a lot more the same as not trusting it. I can and do prototype line-voltage filament LED lamp designs on my bench without a problem, but I think more than anything else it's maintaining a lively awareness of the danger involved that helps there not be a problem. What's really scary is stuff that's as dangerous as those prototypes and doesn't look it - a condition that I think only ionizing radiation excels electricity in making it possible to create. All anyone has to do is screw up wiring an appliance with exposed metal parts, and the whole thing can be live at potentially lethal mains voltage - and I'll freely admit that having had my batteries very unpleasantly charged that way once, thanks to a miswired ceiling fan, strongly informs my perspective on the subject. As with fire, so with electricity: an indispensably useful servant, but also an ineluctably dangerous one, to be regarded with respectful mistrust at all times lest a moment's carelessness end in tragedy.

newsbinator 6y ago

> Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month Is there a good explanation for how this can be the case in a developed country?

justin66 6y ago
The invisible hand of the free market did not want anyone there for a month. We all follow the invisible hand (like, instinctively, since it's invisible). You're not questioning the wisdom of the invisible hand, are you?
- bluGill 6y ago
  you can't blame the free market when comcast has a state sponsored monopoly/duopoly (with the telephone company being the other) on fast internet.
  - justin66 6y ago
    You can blame The High Priests of The Invisible Hand for keeping the members of the duopolies astonishingly poorly regulated, to go back to the original point of the grandparent post. As an aside, it's funny, I'm not sure what qualifies for me as "the telephone company" anymore. I guess there probably is one where I live, technically, but it doesn't seem to factor in. edit: this is evidently going to be one of those posts that fluctuates in "points" over time, bouncing up and down. It'd be fun to have a sparkline implementation that illustrates this change over time
  - hannasanarion 6y ago
    "state sponsored" only in the sense that the state hasn't stepped in to break them up. Comcast's monopoly is entirely self-created through mergers and non-competition agreements.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      No, state sponsored - or more likely city sponsored. If you attempt to run wires around your neighborhood to provide TC, Telephone, and internet (you need to do all 3 to have a chance at making money) you will be shut down because Comcast already as an agreement with the city to not allow anyone else to do it. I'm assuming a serious plan to run wires above. That is you have found deep packet backers to fund you; you have found qualified people to do the work; you have figured out all the other details to do this. There are good reasons to stop someone running cat-6 wires everywhere, but here I'm assuming you have figured out the right way to do this - whatever it is.

aaronmdjones 6y ago

In the UK we call this a PEN conductor fault. It's called a PEN conductor when it's used as a combined Protective Earth & Neutral, as in a TN-C-S earthing arrangement. The property earthing is bonded to the incoming neutral cable before the consumer unit ("fuse board" / breaker panel). This relies on the fact that the neutral side of the supply transformer is itself earthed (this is why it's called neutral; its potential with respect to the earth is ~0V). If the neutral supply to your property is broken, then the return current will pass through the internal neutral wiring in your home, back through any protective devices like breakers and RCDs, and then jump across your earth bond, back through the earth wiring in your home, and then to e.g. a water line or gas line bond, or in your case, coaxial; through the earth itself, and then back to the neutral side of the supply transformer, completing the circuit. This has 3 important implications: 1) The return conductor (e.g. coaxial cable) may not be adequately-sized to carry the current you're asking it to, but your circuit breakers are rated in relation to the fixed internal wiring of your property, so they won't trip. This risks melting and subsequently breaking the conductor, leading to: 2) The exposed metalwork in your house becomes live. Screws at lightswitches, metal ceiling lighting pendants, copper water and gas lines, the works. All of it. This leads to: 3) An RCD (GFCI) or a device that contains an RCD (like an RCBO) will not save you when you come into contact with any of it, because the current is first passing back through that RCD on your internal neutral wiring, so there is no current imbalance from its perspective. So yes, very dangerous. In the UK, we use concentric cabling for our street supplies, so it is very hard to accidentally sever the outer neutral conductor without also severing the inner line conductor.

yholio 6y ago
In a properly executed TN-C-S distribution, the TN-C and TN-S sections are separated with a 4 way single junction point where the PEN conductor coming from the station is connected to the local grounding rod and after this the separated PE and Neutral conductors are drawn into the property. Absolutely no circuit breaker is allowed on the PEN conductor upwards of this separation point. This arrangement remains safe regardless of any single fault in any of the 4 wires. If the PEN conductor breaks but the local earthing still has decently low resistance, the internal PE protection that connects to the case of electronic appliances is still connected to the ground. If strong currents are drawn the voltage of the PE in relation to the real ground will increase, but the mains voltage will also fluctuate with the difference; so you might get a 20-30V drop in the mains voltage and the same voltage appears on the PE, not usually dangerous and you can see something is wrong with the power. Differential and overload protections still work since they have a safe return via the grounding rod. If, on the other hand, the local grounding malfunctions, the PE is still secured to the PEN, which should be grounded at the nearest pole or local transformer. This is a harder defect to detect and periodic checks are recommended on the local ground, but at least you have single fault protection, and two things need to happen before a dangerous condition can occur (both local grounding and the PEN conductor must have a fault). An adjacent benefit of having good local grounding in this configuration is cleaner and more stable voltage, since all groundings of all houses in an area are connected in parallel to the same PEN line, providing a path to the ground that might have a lower impedance than the PEN line feeding it.

saltspork 6y ago

Open neutrals are no joke, here’s a good analysis of a similar situation that caused a house fire: https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Open-Neutral/Open-Neutral.html https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Open-Neutral/Open-Neutr... Here in Australia the coax connection from the street typically goes through a galvanic isolator to avoid this situation, rather than being bonded to the earth.

C1sc0cat 6y ago
Wow what a mess
_trampeltier 6y ago
Open neutrals are no joke but each case does give a good story every time again. I know a guy who cut a 70mm2 neutral in a factory. They had a lot of single phase drive inverters. I think somethink like 25 inverters had to be replaced (and a lot of other stuff too).
robocat 6y ago
What do you mean by “galvanic isolator”? Link to coax example device? I’ve never heard the term before and a quick google is showing something irrelevant. NZer, so the language barrier exists!
- jhiesey 6y ago
  Probably an isolation transformer. A search for “cable tv isolation transformer” gives lots of results.
- 8bitsrule 6y ago
  Hadn't heard the term before. Looks like its two diodes in parallel, pointing opposite directions, in a very-expensive box. Blocks low-voltage DC flow while allowing higher-voltage AC currents to pass. Looks like maritime usage is common. http://www.yandina.com/galvanicIsolator.htm http://www.yandina.com/galvanicIsolator.htm

mnw21cam 6y ago

A few years back, when we had a load of wet weather, we had a power cut. It lasted about an hour before the power came back on again, only to go off after about 30 seconds. This time it was off for about 5 minutes, then back on for 30 seconds again. On a whim, I wandered down the road. It had stopped raining. About 50m down the road there was a dry patch of pavement and a smell of burning plastic. Another 100m down the road was the electricity substation, with a guy from the electric company who said he was trying yet another 300A fuse. He said that often the cable can be shorted out by ground water, but connecting it up again may heat it enough to drive the water out and make it fine. I asked him after breaking three fuses already, how he thought another one would solve the problem, and would he like to know where the short was? Took a bit of persuading to get him to walk 100m up the road to where the dry patch and smell of burning plastic was, and of course by then the smell had worn off a bit. Another electric company guy arrived with a smelling device, which they bashed into the tarmac to try to identify the location of the break, eventually settling with exactly where I told them it was. Within a couple of hours after that, a team had ripped up the pavement, dug down to the cable, spliced it, wrapped it up in waterproofing, refilled the hole, and relaid the pavement. But I think your story wins.

searchableguy 6y ago

In India, ISPs intentionally cut the cables to annoy competitor's customers. It's insane how many people don't do anything but simply switch while being aware.

reportingsjr 6y ago
Don't worry, that happens in the US too. Super annoying and dishonest.
- m463 6y ago
  I've had friend have their lines cut by comcast or ilk. I think it started with old cable systems where people would connect their cable themselves without paying for service. Then when the techs would go to install service they would see if any of the nearby houses were hooked up without being on the customer list, and cut their cable. A friend of mine had her cable cut, probably for the same reason. Unfortunately the cable went to her satellite dish, not comcast. (I guess it could have been competitors too)

smichel17 6y ago

Just FYI, I really enjoyed your story but I almost closed the tab and didn't read it due to "Read on to find out" in the first paragraph. It sets off all the clickbait alarms in my head, which make me expect to find a bunch of low-quality content. The rj45 cable melting is just as good of a hook (and is actually why I continued reading). I'd suggest sticking the first sentence onto the front of the second paragraph and removing the rest of the first paragraph.

ethanwillis 6y ago
Thanks for that feedback. I'm having to do a lot more writing for my job now so being able to improve my writing with honest feedback is super important. I agree, I even cringed a little bit when I wrote it. But I didn't want to fully give everything away so it was just a bad edit :) Your suggestion would work a lot better.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Be sure to write specifically for your target audience. That clickbait would work if your target was the Lowest Common Denominator. It doesn't work so well with a highly technical audience.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- virgulino 6y ago
  You had me hook, line and sinker at "cable in my cable modem melted". Great story and great writing, thanks!

arnon 6y ago

That's an incredible story! It's amazing what you can discover when you start back-tracing issues like this. A few months ago, my house started having intermittent failures. It turns out that some road works caused one of the phases in my house to leak into the other phase, which caused a whole array of problems, but only in specific areas of the house. We discovered this by piping 40kV into the wiring and listening to crackling in the ground, where we found the faulty cabling.

hyperdimension 6y ago
I'm very intrigued--can I get any more details about how you could safely do that? Did you, e.g. disconnect the main breaker and have a spare Van de Graaff generator lying around?
- arnon 6y ago
  I obviously had help :) I had an electrician come and perform this step. The house was disconnected from the source, and then a "thumper" was used: https://megger.com/portable-fault-location-system-stx40- https://megger.com/portable-fault-location-system-stx40- 2000
- rosswilson 6y ago
  It's called Insulation Resistance Testing and an electrician would typically use a device like a Megger tester. Here's a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXUuuV4_sw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXUuuV4_sw
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    Oh, of course. I was not thinking right. I was imagining a 'chunky' HV supply rather than a hi-pot tester, like some Stanford Research PSU, but those only went up to a few kV if I'm remembering correctly. Thanks.

S_A_P 6y ago

Being somewhat savvy here probably saved the Comcast tech from severe injury I could imagine them poking around and getting a shocking result.

larrydag 6y ago

Yes. Severed neutral lines are bad. A tree next to the house had eventually worn down the neutral line into our house and severed it. We heard buzzing and saw smoke in the house. Fortunately all the was burnt was an extension bar. It could have been a lot worse.

ineedasername 6y ago

Send Comcast a bill for your services.

jdeibele 6y ago

We were about to leave for vacation in August. The night before we left, the power went off, then came back on. This happened 1, 2, 3, 20 times. I switched off the main breaker and then went outside to see if I could find out what was going on. Nobody was outside and it was hard to tell if other homes had electricity - a lot of people were gone on vacation themselves and it was still bright. I tried calling electricians but couldn't get anybody out quickly enough so I ended up calling the power company. They dispatched a guy with a small truck with a short cherry-picker. He was able to diagnose the problem as branches rubbing on the power line. He trimmed around it so I could turn the power back on. Our house was built in 1914 and the tree wasn't there. Somewhere over 100 years the tree in our neighbor's yard was planted and grew large enough to interfere with the power line. While we were gone the power company replaced the connection with a shorter, more direct line that avoided the tree entirely. As another poster said, I think your story is better because of your diagnosing the problem yourself.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

The more I find out about professional trades involving danger, the more I realize everything is a shit show. As developers we often think our mess is the biggest but let me tell you a story about how Exxon drilled a shallow well on the site of an old refinery to recapture product that was leaking into the soil from rusty pipes.