Power cuts

In the 25 years I lived in my last house in southern suburbia I can count the number of times the lecky went out on the fingers of one heavily mutilated hand. Since moving to the middle of feckin nowhere in Aberdeenshire it's been about a dozen times in 18 months.

We started off with a spate of them in 2012, then it settled down for a while, we had another one last back end and then it went out for an hour and a half yesterday again. Several have been in the middle of the night where I only realise it happened because the clock on the cooker is flashing and has lost its settings when I get up.

I'd assumed it was just some specific fault on a wire local to our little enclave here which some bugger really ought to get round to fixing properly but finally I phoned up the power company yesterday when the phone started working again and it had knocked out the power to 352 houses over a several mile area and was reported in as "an explosion at the top of a power pole in someone's garden".

He also looked up the previous outage and that was over a wide area too. So no general problem with our local supply, just sod's law it seems. Branches falling onto cables etc.

So I'm happy it isn't just my house or its supply but surprised it happens so often. Is this just a "living in the sticks" sort of thing we have to get used to?

Reply to
Dave Baker
Loading thread data ...

Pretty much... lots of overhead distribution, tree, weather etc.

UPS the important things, and consider a generator and transfer switch.

Reply to
John Rumm

What he said. We live in the middle of nowhere, too, on the end of many kilometers of overhead distribution. I bought a big UPS.

Reply to
Huge

It is a living in the sticks thing. You might be out for days if we have heavy snow and they have many faults/can't get out to fix things.. Take due precautions. Open fire/stove, portable generator. Camping gas stove.

It arises out of having overhead power lines.

Reply to
harryagain

That sounds a bit like a run of bad luck. We lose power a couple of times a year here in North Yorkshire. The last memorable one was a direct hit on the village hall by lightning which took down all three phases in the village as the main breaker went pop.

Usually we lose power in bad weather storms or ice so it is helpful to have a wood burning stove and a backup generator for freezer etc.

Not just branches whole trees. My hedge is still recovering from the last one to fall across the power line (which is now one of the bundled insulated aluminium 3 phase spiral wound round a steel hauser). This stuff can actually survive having a tree fall on it and come back up again! However the poles are all bent (marked do not climb) and some lost their electricity because it ripped their connections off the wall.

Something you will have to get used to. Buy a couple of emergency lights and LED torches with a high resistance bridging the on/off switch so that about 20uA can flow in standby. That way you have some light when the power goes off (and stock up on candles).

This version of the 3M dayglo plastic torch is impressive and well worth having if you live in an area prone to power cuts. The light from its case is enough to find it and in extremis see by once dark adapted. It only takes 3 AA cells so isn't that long lasting but it is very handy since you can find it reliably after the lights have gone out!

formatting link

There is a fob version too. Ignore all the other so called glotorches they use the old zinc sulphide glows green for 15 minutes after being blasted by an arc lamp for an hour. This stuff is the real deal.

(no connection with the seller other than having bought one from him)

It is an ideal Xmas stocking filler.

Reply to
Martin Brown

Yep. When I worked for an electricity board, the rural areas always got a lot more outages than the urban areas, even though some of the latter also had overhead distribution lines. Rural overhead lines are a lot longer, much more exposed to damage, more difficult to inspect (helicopter surveys were expensive and restricted to the major lines) and often more difficult to reach when they do need repair.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
Nightjar

Well in a wy it is, but its also lack of inspection. Many years ago people used to walk the lines and get trees pruned that might hit the cables and look for overheating transformers etc, but I have the feeling that they now plan on a given life for hardware, and do not look so often at long low runs of cable near trees. I've also heard via some comments from people that Ofcom are getting more reports of interference from insulators than used to be the case, so I'd suggest less inspection is definitely going on, or not if you get my drift. ask a person who lives in Norfolk, they have similar issues. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

NEDL are not too bad up here in North Yorkshire and replaced our aging once insulated copper three phase with the insulation all hanging off arcing and sparking in the rain with new aluminium hauser based cable about a decade ago. Very impressive stuff it is too.

They seem to come around about very five years and give close trees a haircut or sooner if the parish council points out a problem to them.

Some of it is based on smarter risk management in that regions with no trees require a lot less inspection. It doesn't always work but you can pretty much predict where the most likely damage hotspots will be.

When you live in a rural backwater you have to accept that you are pretty much last in line when it comes to restoring power. If one team of engineers can reconnect 100,000 people in a nearby city or go off and do 1000 people in a difficult to reach village the choice is clear!

Reply to
Martin Brown

Well in a way it is, but its also lack of inspection.

I lived in rural Norfolk before moving to Leyburn in North Yorkshire 10 years ago. So often were the power cuts I bought a generator to keep the heating and freezer going. Cuts came with amazing frequency due to us being towards the end of quite along dead end supply line. My uncle moved to an isolated farm house in Norfolk with its own water supply, six days without power one winter had him searching in vain all the local hire companies for a generator. No power equalled no water as well as no central heating, or lighting. They learned to cook several meals on the wood burning stove!

Leyburn has the advantage of power coming in from two directions, so when one goes down the other kicks in quite quickly. In the past 10 years I have only used the generator once, and then only for about three hours.

This reminds me I must start and service it!

Mike

Reply to
Muddymike

I think you were just lucky. Living in the south with underground supply, I lose power about 6 times a year, generally for less than a couple of hours, I subscribe to the run a UPS for anything you want to keep alive school, but I really hate resetting the alarm clock. I will only use analogue timers for things, as they are easy to reset. I always fit one to any security light to reset it once a night so that a short power failure doesn't leave it on for weeks. We're also suffering from underground cable faults due to ageing. These can take up to a day to resolve.

Reply to
Capitol

or even "hawser".

there was a tv transmitter near here which lost its power when a tree branch took out the overhead supply. The Supply company suggested to the farmer that he had othe rbranches liable to take out the line and he should remove them. So he did, dropping each one onto the line!

Reply to
charles

Well if you don't like it move back to crowded, boring, dirty, smelly, suburbia...

How long does the power have to be off for you to call it a "power cut"?

The phone didn't work? You don't have a line powered phone plugged in to the line? Bit daft, DECT things won't work without mains... If the power goes here, after finding a tourch or two and reducing the load on the UPS to minimum I'm straight on the phone to the DNO. Normally first to report the outage, more often than not beating the automatic reporting as well, that might come through during the call.

Well in a rural area a single 11 kV line can easily be feeding that number of houses and being rural thats almost certainly going to be a large area. Also 352 house is no great load; base load of a house 1 kW, 352 houses, 352 kW @ 11 kV is only 32 A.

The wires may look thin from the ground but there is a peculiar law that says things that look big up in the air are small at ground level but things that look small up in the air are big at ground level. Round here the 11 kV lines are "wires" about 1 cm dia, that's

80 mm^2. Even several miles isn't going to have a great volt drop, and they can compensate for that to some extent by using different tappings on the transformers.

That's been the fault here for the last couple of times.

12 outages in 18 months is a bit high, we get about 1 a year that requires the backup systems to be brought into action and maybe 2 or 3 interuptions a year that only last a second or two as something trips the auto recloser and it puts the power back.

If all those outage are of the order of 10's of minutes or longer ie no "off for a second or two" it might be that your supply is not via an auto-recloser so if something trips the protection a man has to come out a reset it. Badger the DNO to put one in...

The longest was 36 hours the other year after an ice storm that brought down the lines in many places and snapped half a dozen poles.

Power cuts happen. Even in suburbia, I'd still have handy backups maybe not the generator or the two ring & grill camping stove or the portable gas fire but the gas lanterns and a simple gas camping stove for certain. Gas lanterns are by far the best light source, flat out they chuck out more light than a 60 W tungsten bulb, have run times measured in many hours and a "recharge" is just a cyclinder swap.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

/ - show quoted /...but I really hate resetting the alarm clock. /Q

May I introduce you to dab alarm clocks with a battery backup (I think)

/I will only use analogue timers for things, as they are easy to reset.

May I suggest the cheapo electronic plugin timers that remember the time & nous programming...

/I always fit one to any security light to reset it once a night so that a short power failure doesn't leave it on for weeks. /Q

Weeks?! Where are you meantime? On the Costa?!

Presumably you have to trot around all these mech timers to reset them to correct time when power is restored then?

Jim K (of the sticks)

Reply to
Jim K

The real problem is that the government don't enforce high enough penalties when electricity supplies fail.

Worse than that, when there is bad weather the amount that the suppliers have to pay by way of compensation to customers who have been cut off is halved.

Since the '87 storm my supply was failed three times because of falling trees hitting overhead lines. The last time was this month. We were cut off for 48 hours. Nothing was done to correct the problem for the first

30 hours, probably because other problems were being attended to. There would have been a 4th time just before last Christmas, fortunately the tree just clipped the line as it fell and only cause a temporary outage.

If the electricity supplier cut down all the trees that could hit the lines if they fell, or put the cables underground the problem would be avoided.

I have a similar problem with my BT phone line however in that case I have ordered an underground fibre connection which I am hoping will be more reliable. I will be disappointed if the broadband Internet is not

100 times faster.
Reply to
Michael Chare

Which make (and maybe model if arsed you can be :) ?

Because it's a very good alternative to a generator - particularly as it can be "always online".

I was considering a dedicated "generator radial circuit" with an external input socket (male socket) and a few sockets in key places.

However, as our power failures are typically for no longer than a few hours (1-2 normally and 6 max) I do wonder if a UPS might be a betetr idea.

Could have the CH, modem/network and fridge/freezer permanently on it.

Cheers!

Tim

Reply to
Tim Watts

On 27/02/2014 15:33, Michael Chare wrote: ...

That is an average of around once every nine years. IMO a very good record.

How much extra would you be willing to pay for your electricity to achieve that level of maintenance?

... but undergrounding has problems of its own.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
Nightjar

Probably be banned now, but when I was learning systems in the 80s, our lecturer always referred to Murphy and his jackhammer, when introducing random failures into the equation.

Many years later, a firm I worked for had a 24 hour outage because some nearby contractors managed to drill through a power cable ....

Reply to
Jethro_uk

Nothing - because they do that now.

We've just had about a dozen trees removed by Western Power - free of charge to us - because their proximity to lines posed a risk. Having moved in last year, we phoned them to arrange transfer of the wayleave for some poles, and asked about the tree clearance. A surveyor was here in days, and went a funny colour - the lines had allegedly been inspected a couple of years previously, but clearly not particularly well...

They aim for five metres clearance from 11kv lines, and 3m from 230v, but if the landowner is unwilling to co-operate they can get a court order granting them access and rights to clear 3m from 11kv and 1m from 230v. And that's horizontal distance as well as vertical. Anything that's further than that but may pose a risk should it fall will be glared at, too.

They take this very seriously indeed...

Reply to
Adrian

Well, it's a SmartUPS 2200, s/h on eBay. That might not be a "big" UPS by your standards, but it was by mine.

Reply to
Huge

I've got a couple of those, both saved from being skipped and a 1400, they're fairly "cold war" design, never see to go wrong. Last time I replaced the batteries with 3rd party equivalents they seemed a reasonable price, need doing again and the prices seem to have shot-up. So for the past 3 months or so I've bypassed them - and noticed how much power they consume just sitting there (cooking their batteries!).

Reply to
Andy Burns

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.