We're remodeling a 65 year old house in an old part of Dallas and when we first moved in, everytime it rained the lights when out for 4-5 hours. We complained and complained but nothing ever happened. When we talked to the other neighbors they really didn't seem to want to do anything about it. They were elderly and seemed to have become content with the lights just going out from time to time.

After 9-10 months, entire blocks of neighborhoods started going out around us everytime too, so they were forced to come in and fix the problem. Man was it frustrating.

Oh, I brought this up to tell you your right about the other costs that really incur. We lost a couple of almost full refrigerators of food during that time. That was expensive. One of the outages lasted almost 3 days.