Article in local paper about a cable theft resulting in 400volts being fed to a pub and destroying almost everything electrical. I suppose it was an earth wire on a transformer.
It occurred to me that I didn't know if a typical domestic set-up would react to this - would the trips activate? In view of the increasing number of scroats who have a hunger for cable, is there anything a householder can do to protect against such surges?
Regards
John Plant
Can't think of any protection - this isn't a little spike that can be potentially dissipated. This will likely carry the full force of the local supply.
We had a fault like this on the local supply from the nearest transformer in Colchester. One third of the houses fed by the transformer got extra high '250' volts, one third got less and I'm not really sure what the remaining third got. It was a fault as opposed to someone stealing the wire. In our house it killed a couple of PC power supplies and blew a some lamp bulbs but that was about it.
Who covered your costs?
Chris
I posted this on 25th March - same problem reported in Hull local rag
Someone did tell me that there is a very simple solution to this which is fitted as standard by the power companies in some less civilised countries where copper theft is much more common.
If I remember correctly it's something like this: an RCD is fitted with an appropriate value resistor to earth so that the RCD does not trip with the normal voltage but when the voltage increases the current through the resistor to earth increases and trips the RCD thus disconnecting everything from the mains supply. When the cable is replaced you just have to reset the RCD.
I wouldn't recommend trying it though unless you really know what you are doing and even then I think copper thefts are still sufficiently rare that it wouldn't be worth all the false trips you would probably get.
The electricity supplier, they paid against bills for replacement PC power supplies etc. I guess they felt fairly lucky in our case as I didn't charge them for a whole PC.
As we are talking private comapnies who only exist to give their shareholders dividends I wouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't invoke force majeure.
Household contents insurance might cover it.
hmm dunno about rare, the big substation that feeds this area has had loads of cameras, beam break sensors and stuff like that recently installed, not heard of any thefts from it so seems to be a precautionary measure,
mind, a few years back a security guard confronted a couple of pikeys nicking the signaling cable at a train station, one of them promptly took off most of his jaw with a shovel before they legged it,
Sounds like a good business model. You've got your stuff back for some one else to nick and sell back later on.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Nick Odell saying something like:
"... and not a trace of how they did it."
No. The stuff was okay, but the supervisor was kidnapped a few times!
SteveW
*applause*
Ah, Nigeria. When I worked for Xerox, we sent a shipload of copier spares there, which all vanished between the port and the warehouse. A few days later someone strolled into our offices and offered to sell them all back to us.
Ah, Essex, we had a transit, chipper and trailer stolen from a guarded compound. A few days later...
AJH
LOL
I bet no-one ever threw a corpse over your compound wall, though? (According to my friend who was on a 2 year secondment there, they threw it back.)
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