Recent Power Outages

This week at roughly 4:10am in the morning one day I was awoken to a loud beeping noise which I've become immediately aware is my battery backup on my server rack warning that its running on battery. It only lasted a few minutes till silence which suggests either a battery needing replacement or that I'm drawing way too much power from a battery source.

As I sat in the darkness in bed wondering why I've lost power again for no real reason (i.e no inclement weather) I decided to get to work combing through my emails.

Outages at my Temple Terrace, FL house

• 5/7/2026 - 4:23am - 115 customers out
• 3/18/2026 - 2:20am - 2,022 customers out
• 3/16/2026 - 8:03pm - 5,104 customers out
• 11/3/2025 - 5:46pm - 116 customers out
• 7/24/2025 - 9:48am - 116 customers out
• 11/23/2022 - 8:44am - 1,520 customers out

I found 6 outages which tells the story of my recent experience. It used to be quite a rare sight to lose power especially since there have been many hurricanes between these dates. We take the November 2022 outage which set the stage for going 974 days without a single power interruption! This is pretty crazy because if we list all the hurricanes between those days - it seems like Temple Terrace power was pretty stable.

• Hurricane Nicole - November 2022 (~6,000 power loss)
• Hurricane Idalia - August 2023 (~30,000 power loss)
• Hurricane Debby - August 2024 (~40,000 power loss)
• Hurricane Helene - September 2024 (~100,000 power loss)
• Hurricane Milton - October 2024 (~600,000 power loss)

(all these numbers purely TECO, not including Duke Energy)

We survived in terms of not losing power for 4 major hurricanes up in the Temple Terrace area which even surprised myself. Especially for Hurricane Milton which had flooded my street, but somehow had no loss of power.

It blew my mind that after Hurricane Milton when ~600,000 people around Tampa Bay had no power - I still did. Even with a front yard partially underwater I still had the electricity flowing. I also got to experience kayaking around your own neighborhood streets.

That flooding might have led for my luck to run out. As sitting at work one day in July of 2024 my VPN back home (in order to drop ads, etc) no longer worked. Sure enough the emails started coming in that power was out at home. This was the least stressful outage as power was back on before I got home.

The November 3rd (2025) outage was the worst one by far. Just a regular after work day relaxing with some screens and everything in the house went dark. As the night got darker I succumbed to the truth that I was going to bed with no power, but I was sure checking the TECO Outage map every so often.

This outage was the worse as my neighborhood slowly gained power except for us - I watched our outage circle shrink as it went from 110 -> 73 -> 27 -> 26 -> 10 -> 5 without power. When you are 1 of 5 people without power in the entire Tampa Bay area you know the situation to fix your power isn't easy.

As the early morning arrived still in darkness I could hear electrical workers outside with their trucks backed into both yards of the houses with those big green electrical boxes. I had no idea what they were doing, but since one side had a massive cable on a wheel I imagine something was being rerun between these boxes.

I decided to go on an early 6am run to investigate the situation and when I got home to take a shower - the beauty of power was back. This was our first outage in years that took over 12 hours to resolve.

The next pair of outages started making me curious what was going on. This time in March of 2026 I'm just preparing to play a video game with some friends. We are still in the lobby at ~8pm waiting for everyone to join. Everything goes dark in my house and it appears we lost power again.

This time with ~5,000 people affected I imagined it was something more global. Closer to bed this time we sat outside to appreciate the quiet darkness and chat with a neighbor or two doing the same thing. At some point a few hours later the power was back on, but we were basically in bed at that point.

Two days later in the middle of night (2am) the power goes out again this time targeting ~2,300 customers. As we woke up with the power still out we wondered if a morning routine would have to be in darkness. Thankfully somewhere around 6:30am the power was back and we were back at it.

Now we land at the power outage on May 7, 2026 which led to this blog. Woken up in the middle of the night (4am) for an outage that was fixed roughly an hour later around 5:30am. With such a complex network of 2 switches, 2 access points, 3 cameras and 30 connected devices - power outages are not friendly to this enterprise level UniFi setup.

TECO in my case never gives a reason for an outage, but boy I'm curious what is going on. Going from almost 1,000 days without a power outage to one roughly every 72 days is a new annoying norm.