Power outages can happen at the worst times and for the strangest reasons.
Take the morning of Friday, September 20, when the new iPhone5 was set to go on sale.
It was minutes before 8 AM in Bethesda, MD. A line of customers, eager to buy, stretched from the door of the Apple store all the way around the block. As the Wall Street Journal Washwire blog posted,
…just moments before the suburban Washington store was set to open at 8 a.m., the power went out, according to buyers’ and local news reporters’ posts on Twitter. A call to the Apple store went unanswered. Local power company Pepco later confirmed there was a power outage.
In fact, the power went out for the whole block that the would-be iPhone buyers were lined up around. “Whole block went dark,” one of them tweeted.
The outage’s cause was just as strange as its timing. “A squirrel made contact with our equipment and caused a fault,” @PepcoConnect tweeted. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
Squirrels have been causing lots of outages recently. They keep knocking out the power in downtown Lynchburg, VA, for example, costing consumers time and businesses lost sales – and that’s more than an “inconvenience.”
Of course, if the Bethesda Apple store, or the Lynchburg downtown merchants, had Milestone Solar systems with battery backup, the outage wouldn’t have inconvenienced them one bit.
The lights would have stayed on, the doors open. They’d have been able to ring up sales and earn profits. And if the outage had been a long one, the sealed battery backup bank would have been recharging every second the sun was in the sky.
If a constant power supply matters to you, contact us for a free solar, consultation and learn more about our battery backup. After all, you never know when a squirrel might strike again.