I work for the power company (as a desk jockey) and every year we have at least 2 or 3 of our experienced field workers killed either from mistakes or unforeseeable circumstances.

Feel free to put breakers in your panel if you want, but when it comes to the whole panel, let a professional do it. There is a reason you need 8000 on the job hours before you can become certified master electrician.

Im a shitty amateur electrician. I installed some outlets and had to have a smarter person come in to sort out where my mistake was. Absolutely get an electrician to sort it out.

If you cant or don't want to involve an electrician, I would start by identifying all the switches and outlets on each circuit. Then uninstall everything you did and reinstall it all, turning the power on after each piece to make sure that it doesn't trip the circuit. I got two wires backwards and would never have found it myself. The brain is weird and will hide your own mistakes.

Outlet by outlet is the only troubleshooting method to find where the mistake is. Other than calling a pro.

>I assume the "heroism" at your company is related to the fact this
>
>didn't happen in Texas, so whoever still had power lines could still get power.

That's what my understanding was. We were very closes to catastrophic failure of the whole system and the techs out in the freezing cold working with the control centers to stop the complete failure and limit the damage. If were going to call anyone "heroic" there it would be the techs in the field. Its not like Texas has anyway to clear or salt the roads for them to get where they needed to go.

At the time it was happening all i knew is that my power was turning off and on every 45 minutes and my boss basically told our entire team to sit home and ride out the storm as our job functions were not needed that week, even if we would have had power to do them.

Also, fuck all the politicians that refuse to upgrade our system.

TIL. Like I said I'm a desk monkey trained to do a specific task, and my boss gave me the dumbed down version that I'm probably not recalling 100%.

I actually work in Texas power industry and remember when that storm hit. After it was all over the CEO held a meeting and congratulated everyone for their heroic work. I work a menial desk job, so afterwards I actually pulled my boss aside and asked her what he was talking about.

The dumbed down version that she gave me is that if the grid overloads and starts to fail, the power surges through the lines and burns them up. Imagine thousands of miles of high voltage fuses burning all across the state. As it was places were without power for days or maybe a week. It they hadn't been able to manage the load, it would have been months upon months to rebuild the system.