OT: power cut

Odd to have a power cut today, not as if there's a storm or something. First of all they tried a remote reset three times, then left it for 10 minutes and tried twice more - the second of which fixed it.

On Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:01:56 +0000, Tim Streater wrote:
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Oddly, we had a water cut. (burst main down thew road, fixed within two hours)
I was panicking a bit because they came and fixed a MAJOR underground leak on our property on Friday [1], and I was afraid something had gone wrong with that.
[1] Discovered when they fitted a water meter. Free fix. Leaking 1.5 cubic metres a day.

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Ha, there was a big leak at the southern end of Hollow Lane the other day, with a river flowing downhill under the A2 and into Wincheap. Freezing as it went.

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I glued my fingers together with superglue by mistake when I was repairing some lighting.

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I've always used the term "power cut" to mean a deliberate removal of the supply. What mostly happens is a power failure. Here we had a short one on Friday. According to someone posting on Streetlife it was caused by a fault "at the exchange". Actually it was at a sub-station a few miles away.

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Autorecloser?

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I assume so, I have very limited knowledge of that sort of gubbins on lines. The lights went out, then about a minute later, went on/off with a brief flash, and the same again twice more with about 10 sec intervals. Then the 10 min break while we got some candles lit, then another flash, and finally came on 10 sec later.

How strange, must have been a very big spider to take all that current! Brian

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com says...
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Apart from the enforced cuts during the miners' and power workers' strikes of the 1970s and the great hurricane, I couldn't remember power cuts until I started working on the Isle of Dogs in late 1990.
There, power cuts were a daily occurrence, both on and off the 'island' and, as I was working for a cable TV company they didn't do much for reliability!
Obviously the infrastructure couldn't cope with the massive Docklands expansion but, hopefully, they've got it fixed by now ...

On Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:34:52 +0000, Terry Casey wrote:
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We had one a couple of weeks ago. Lasted about 5 minutes with no autocloser false starts afterwards.
Didn't really affact us at all. Emergency light came on, PC and Internet kept going!

On 23/01/17 11:51, Bob Eager wrote:
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same here. I suspect they are testing their ability to do rolling blackouts and load shedding...
...i'll get my tinfoil hat...

On Mon, 23 Jan 2017 11:57:19 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
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.-)

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Had a 'blip' the other day - lights went off and on within a second. Monitor rebooted, main fully-loaded PC kept going, NAS1 with 5 disks rebooted, identical NAS2 with 2 disks kept going, router rebooted.

In article < snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-
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We DID have a power cut here, on the outskirts of Lincoln about 3 months ago. I was in the local pub - where else? - when I got a panic call from my wife to say all the lights had gone out! She hadn't, at that stage, looked outside or realised that the WiFi was no longer working on her phone.
I looked out of the pub doorway and noticed it looked rather dark on the road that led home ...
When I left, a guy on a cherry picker was busily splicing cables at the top of the utility pole - distribution on the main roads is overhead but the side roads are cabled underground - and his colleague explained that the problem was caused by a faulty transformer and the supplies were being transferred to another source.
Sure enough, half way bavk home the street lights came back and power had already been restored at home some time previously. I was quite surprised by the speedy response and wondered if, perhaps, an alarm had been generated when one phase had gone down and power to the remaining properties had been maintained until the crew arrived.

On Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:01:56 +0000, Tim Streater wrote:
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Just a few seconds for each on off period once it started before staying off? An auto-recloser doing its job, detects fault (earth leakage, not sure about overload, I'll have to ask...) disconnects the supply waits a second or three and reconnects. If the fault is still there it trips again and will try a third time before locking out and needing a manual reset.
This means that a lighting strike or tree growth touching the line doesn't put people off supply for extendend periods. Errant tree growth gets vapourised when it touches the line so very rarely has repeat performance until it's grown back...
The three trips don't have to be straight after each other, IIRC three trips in three, may be 5, minutes will cause a lockout. This is fine until the fault is intermittent and takes longer than the reset period to re-occur. We've had that, after the first 4 or 5 on/off/on cycles in ten minutes I switched the CU's off, gawd knows what is happening to the supply...
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They may have been trying to find a leaky insulator. They have some device that measures earth currents and by moving those device(s) about the local network can determine the section with the fault. They'll then reroute the supply to unaffected sections before fixing the real fault.