Appliances crackled back to life and light bulbs again blazed across most of the Northeast following the worst blackout in US history.
The lingering effects of Thursday's dramatic power outage stretched into yesterday as millions struggled with both the mundane -- resetting VCR clocks -- to the life-threatening -- boiling tap water to ensure potability.
Some customers in the Cleveland area, upstate New York and New York City received the unkindest cut of all: Their power was restored and then promptly turned off due to rolling blackouts needed to conserve electricity.
Officials in Michigan warned that the whir of air conditioners and the glow of televisions might not return until the end of the weekend as the cause of the massive outage remained a mystery.
About 50 members of the National Guard helped distribute 28,770 liters of drinking water in Cleveland. Residents of Cleveland and Detroit, battling low pressure, were told to boil water.
Canada and the US formed a joint task force on Friday to investigate what caused the blackout -- which knocked out service in parts of eight states and Canada in just nine seconds -- and how to prevent it from happening again.
In Connecticut, residents heard an emergency plea from the governor to cut back on power use after a state transmission line that feeds the southwest part of the state failed early on Friday.
The call for conservation echoed across blacked-out states. "If you don't turn them off, they will go off," said Long Island Power Authority Chairman Richard Kessel.
Chris Bowen, 47, of Syracuse, New York, said he and his family would try to heed the plea.
"We'll probably leave the air conditioner off tonight when we go to sleep. We played cards by candlelight last night and it was fun. Maybe we'll do that again."
US President George W. Bush, during a tour of a California national park, said part of the problem was "an antiquated system" to distribute electricity nationally. "It's a wake-up call," he said.
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