The water heater in my basement is seventeen years old, which means it has been living on borrowed time for at least two of them. Every technician who has looked at it says the same thing: “That thing could go tomorrow, or it could go in five years.” What none of them could tell me …
The storm itself was unremarkable. Forty minutes of wind, a lot of rain, done by nine. What followed was fourteen hours without power — long enough to learn that my house, which I’d spent three years making smarter, had quietly become the dumbest thing on the block the moment the grid blinked off. Here’s what …