Power cut questions

I think by the time you had looked at the cost of "local only" ring main parts you might as well just fit a manual changeover switch. That gives you all your lights and the useful little things you might have forgotten, like door bells, phones, mast head amplifiers and wifi extenders.

You'd need the discipline to make sure you didn't run an immersion, washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer, or heater off you generator (unless it is a big one).

Coloured sockets are readily available from electrical wholesalers though.

Its very odd for two adjacent properties to be off, In this road when they had to do a fixe it was every third house as the phases are wired that way, ie, if I had an old fashioned mains intercom, only several doors down could also hear it not next door!

However if its a sub station then it would be a whole lot of all phases as I doubt anyone would want live mains phases about while trying to find a problem. The last time it went of big time around here was when they moved the street lighe in from the curb and went straight through the cable bang, I was out at the time. Brian

It depends what is at fault. This house and its two neighbours were built in 1911 ( the rest of the road being 1930s) and until three years ago were fed from a spur cable off the main road feeder. The a builder, in trying to remove a tree shorted the cable and it took 4 days to replace it. Each house had its own 60kVA genny installed at about 1am!.

They may be able to take down just one phase...

I would have thought a manual changeover would be less hassle than dedicated circuits.

(although the complexity can vary a bit with your earthing system)

Probably... (note previous discussions about

We have a scheduled cut for tomorrow, so going to be in a similar state. Probably not cold enough to light the fire, but will see how it goes. I have a small portable gas hob that will run on a propane bottle for drinks etc, but it sounds like a good excuse for lunch at the pub.

I hope it's within walking distance ;-)

If it's only you and your neighbour you're not looped into them are you?

If you wanted to be less obvious you could uise white sockets with different coloured rockers for identification - or a little coloured dot sticker on each socket or switch to identify the circuit.

Owain

They possibly turned off no power. You might take your power from your neighbours cut out.

shows two setups like that under the TN-S setup.

Now yesterday most of Aukley had it's power cut for a day whilst some trees were felled. 9am to 4pm.

First job of the day was to set up a big 3 phase genny for the local pub ready for the power going off. You knew the power had been cut when the burglar alarms went off:-) I sent the apprentice around posting business cards through the letter boxes of the ones that were sounding.

Most people seem to think that's expected, clearly it proves their alarm has a working battery!

How else woul they workers get their lunch? Sounds like when I installed a new CU - 30+ years ago. I asked to have the power cut off when I did it. I told the bloke from SEEboard, if you come back and reconnect me in a couple of hours I can then put the kettle on. He did and I did.

Its ok, the car is not electric ;-)

And I boxed the genny in with the landlords car to keep the pikeys from stealing it. Probably about £25K of kit sat on the carpark with a tow hook at the front.

Interesting stuff. The power runs down one side of the road (opposite side to us) and each pair of semis has a feed off this.

Next door is the next pair of semis. They had both been off since last night.

There is some kind of fuse box box (mini sub station) under the road and they switched the whole road off whilst they repaired a dodgy joint from (they think) the 1970s.

All back on again within 2 hours.

The interesting and slightly brain twisting thing is that apparently if you are off for more than 12 hours then you have to have a replacement supply from a stand alone generator. So the pair of semis were off over night. This morning the leccy people turned up mob handed with diggers and a generator trailer.

First thing they did was connect the genny up to the people without power. Once that was running (by about 10:00) they turned everyone else off and fixed the problem by around 12:00 and we were all back on within 2 hours of the switch off. So in real terms bringing and running the genny contributed the best part of f*ck all apart from 2 houses having power for

Anyway, learned some stuff :-)

Cheers

Dave R

Top posting for Brians news reader

Actually its far more common to have two properties next to each other on the same phase than it is the have 3 properties next to each other on different phases.

It usually done in pairs of houses.

So houses 1 and 2 are > Its very odd for two adjacent properties to be off, In this road when they

ARW submitted this idea :

Especially so, if the houses are a pair of semi's.

And even then it's 50 - 50 as to which two semis!

Cut outs under the stairs/cellar/wall etc where they are next to each other internally and it's usually a pair of semis on the same phase.

With cut outs on the external wall then it's the nearest semi that you are NOT attached to.

So no 1 gets it own phase, but no 3 and no 5 which are separate buildings are on the same phase. One shared cable down the pathway between them.

Any idea why, in a road with c. 150 Victorian terraced houses, they ended up with about 5 of us with power on when all the rest were without last time there was a local power cut? (I've never had the chutzpah to ask neighbours if I could test which phase they're on: this _is_ London.)

God knows what we have here? Our house is one of a pair of semis, but power comes in at opposite ends, so unlikely to be shared. However all the semis were built a year later than the detached bungalows that neighbour our other side.

SteveW

In article , Brian Gaff writes

In our close all the houses except one are on the same phase.