Lights Out?

[jrwalliker]

Maybe - its hard to tell from a distance what is in a tank. However, it did appear at the same time as the generator - which also proves nothing.

John

[Dave Liquorice]

Not at all surprised, without power almost all shops have to close. No power, no computer systems, no POS system, no stock system...

Quite a few have, it's not obvious as far as light level and quality is concerned but if you look at the fittings it is.

[Dave Liquorice]

collapses,

Naw, it won't be rota'd power cuts published a week in advance like it was in the early 70's. They might try and shuffle the areas affected around and publish an "at risk" schedule but I have sneaky feeling HMG wouldn't like that admission. B-)

Smelly, not easy to light, tempremental things. Gas lanterns are cleaner and easier. Fuel is probably easier to obtain as well.

[Martin Brown]

The France one seems to be running at 2+ GW. He'll have to tweak fsd.

[Chris French]

Well, anyone who goes camping will have, and that's quite a lot of people.

In another thread very recently Andrew Gabriel posted about using and inverter to run the CH (and fridges?) and running it from the car - using the car as a generator effectively.

[dennis]

Since then there have been a lot of changes to the distribution grid, places that are essential frequently have separate feeds to the surrounding areas so power cuts can be less damaging if we get to that stage. Try and get someone with an oxygen machine in an adjacent house to have less chance of a power cut. Living next to a hospital or similar won't save you this time.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Dave Liquorice escribió:

One of them is faulty, I think, and running at vastly reduced capacity,

[Jethro_uk]

When I did my sandwich year in 1986, it was in office for a company that had been deemed nationally important in the 1970s. Near Marble Arch. There were still fixings on the windows for blackout blinds. When I asked what they were, I was told they had been fitted in the 1970s, to hide the fact the building was in use during the 3-day week. There were still staff there who could remember them in use.

The building also had bomb-proof windows up to the 8th floor. This was after the Hyde Park bomb in 1982, which blew out all windows below that level. The operation part of the organisation had a panic button to Scotland Yard ...

[Jethro_uk]

My companys head office have recently completed building a new data centre - which is pretty sexy for those who like that sort of thing ;) The onsite UPS will keep it up for 30 minutes, and there's a BFO diesel genny with 3 days fuel in the wings.

[Tim Watts]

Again??? Or is it still "never worked since installation"?

[Andrew Gabriel]

During the 1970's cuts, my school was on same circuit as a local TB hospital, so we never got cuts at school. TB hospital is long gone now, of course. I still got the fun of the power cuts and candles at home though. I made up lights for my bedroom using a lego battery pack and tourch bulbs.

We had several 'at risk' days at home a few years ago. Ring main in the street had burned out into two pieces (although still working), and there was other urgent maintenance required in the substation. The house down the street with some critical medical equipment in it got a sodding great combined UPS/generator parked up outside it and wired in by the electricity company. I noticed it when they fired up the generator to test it.

As it happens, they managed to do all the repairs without interrupting the supply.

A few months later, the road was resurfaced, which required the old surface scraping off. All the power went off for an hour when the scraper went through a new streetlamp cable which turned out to be only a couple of inches below the edge of the road. I didn't notice any special action for that house, although I was pleasantly surprised they got the road dug up, cable repaired and properly buried, and power back on in an hour.

[Chris J Dixon]

At the time of the 3-day week and power cuts, GEC (as it was then) had 6 diesel-electric locos at Preston which had been ordered by Pakistan, which became embroiled in political problems, and they hadn't taken delivery.

As I recall, the locos were split between the sites at Trafford Park, Sheffield and Preston.

The pair sent to Trafford Park were placed adjacent to the main electrical test area, and connected through one of the rotary converter sets to feed back into the site supply. Together with the existing diesel sets, they enabled work to continue without interruption.

To reduce the heating load, our large office gained a few fairly fierce Calor gas heaters.

As we had a particularly large window area, we improvised secondary double glazing by taping together 4 foot wide rolls of plastic sheeting (1), with a slightly blue tinge. It was surprising how quickly the eyes adapted to the unusual lighting.

(1) Actually available on-site because it was used as the release film for producing mica-based insulation sheets.

Chris

[Martin Brown]

Modern LED torches are the thing now. You can easily get ones that will last many hours on a set of batteries.

This one (not LED) is particulary impressive in a powercut as you can see by the light its Dayglo case emits when the lights go out!

(no connection with the seller just a simple gadget I admire)

When dark adapted the plastic case after a day in sunlight glows all night well enough to see by in a room. You can also bridge the on switch of an LED torch with 1M resistor so it glows a bit.

[Cursitor Doom]

Some of the biggest German energy-intensive companies are re-locating outside the EU due to this nonsense, according to RT. What a great idea for jobs, eh?

[damduck-egg]

Though to hear some of the protests when proposals to curtail the hours of lighting are made you would think that darkness makes the air evaporate and anybody caught outside will die. Given development of the LED has given us lightweight powerful torches and lamps whose battery life leans towards days rather than hours and that clothing with good reflective properties or even its own lights is reasonably easy to come by then I don't see the need for some places to have street lighting at all for the odd half dozen people who may be about on foot. There must be many places that 50 years ago had a couple of pubs and people who walked between them and each others home and possibly a bus stop bringing people back from a cinema trip from town. Now the pubs and bus have gone and people travel in a car with lights yet you have a load of street lamps burning for the those who take their dog out for a late night dump. Fortunately here there has never been any,but there was a time following the spread of rural electrification from the 1920's that by having a couple of street lamps installed a parish council felt that it increased the "status" of the place and they weren't being left behind. 90 years on that doesn't apply any more.

G.Harman

[Jethro_uk]

We've got a set of wind-up torches and a wind-up lantern. Because you

*know* the batteries will be flat when needed.

I'm sure at one time you could easily buy detachable emergency torches which plugged into the mains, and lit up if the power went. However I've not seen them around now.

[Martin Brown]

Good luck with that. You will quickly get fed up with shaking/winding the damn things up. Great as Xmas novelty toys - useless in real life.

They are still around. The one above is passive. I have a couple of emergency lights good for four hours or so on permanent standby.

Main snag of most old designs is that you can't see the torch in resulting darkness if or when the power fails at night.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I generate 200W for half an hour on the exercise bike (or slightly less for very much longer). Always thought it was a silly oversight not to have a 13A socket or 12V battery charger built in so you can use the power, and it's pretty much the only thing I can think of which really should justify being eligable for a feed-in tarrif ;-) It does push the room temperature up though.

[Jethro_uk]

Depends on the purpose and duration. In our case it would have to last long enough for us to put candles up ...

As I said, the ones I was thinking of came on when the power failed - making them easy to see (and lighting the room). The picture on the box showed it fixed to the wall pointing up. Power goes, light comes on, and then you can remove the torch. It's almost the same in reverse as the little (factory fitted) torch in my Citroen which comes on when removed from the housing.

[Dave Liquorice]

Quite common for a 11 kV genset to be jumpered up onto the lines if the power is going to be off for a while and they can isolate the section they are going to work on from it...

Our DNO does jump when emergency repairs are required or they get a report of over voltage(*). The compensation for being off supply isn't much per supply but if they have a couple of hundred customers off supply for > 12 hrs it soon adds up.

(*) Done that twice now, first time was years ago when I got he UPS and it went straight into "voltage reduction" mode. Second time was a month ago, UPS would click and switch a couple of times in the evening, eventually looked at the voltage plot and found it going to about 257 V mean over night with peaks > 260! On both occasions they had an engineer at the door in hours. The first occasion resulted in the tapping on our transformer changed to the lowest within a couple of days.

The recent one was due to the local 33 kV substation being fed from the backup 11 kV line as contractors worked on the 33 kV replacing poles etc. The backup isn't quite so well regulated... They wandered of to the regulator but that was apparently setup and working correctly, they then fitted a voltage recorder for a week and am waiting to hear what they are going to do. On the normal 33 kV the supply is fine (5 V variation daytime around 240 V with a 10 V drop when the E7 dumps an 11 KW load onto it). Still needs to be sorted should the 33 kV fail or need further maintenace and they switch to the 11 kV back up... Also our transformer is apparently only only 16 kW, we regularly pull over 12 kW in the winter and I have a 10 kW shower sitting in a box...