Diagnosing a power cut remotely

My daughter is at university and phoned me up saying they had a power cut in their flat.

She did all the right things - checked the fuse box, checked the main electrical box outside and nothing was tripped.

Strangely the other flats in her building had power but we had seen this once before and it turned out there was a fault in their area, so somehow the other flats must be fed through some other feed from the grid.

I was concerned that there was a serious problem.

It suddenly dawned on me to check the smart meter connected to the feed into the property. That had nothing on the display which proved that it was not getting power and hence it was an external power issue to the flat.

She phoned and reported it and an engineer was dispatch to fix it. It turns out there were about 60 properties affected and the engineer was good enough to check with my daughter when the power was restored.

So if you are unsure if it is just you or a wider outage then maybe check the smart meter as well.