Power cuts

Dave Baker · 2014-02-27T08:15:41+00:00

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?

Feb 27, 2014 107 Replies

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Martin Brown 12 years ago

OK. In that case it is as I suspected a "direct" line back to the exchange since no such detail occurs on my number or any nearby.

This is a little odd since I know there is a junction box (smaller than a true cabinet) which used to be in a hedge and is now buried. One year a hedge flailer destroyed it producing multicoloured spaghetti and Redcare alerts on all the monitored circuits in the neighbourhood.

Not surprisingly none of the Redcare premises responded to the call to check if they were OK and a major police alert ensued. It took BT more than a fortnight to reconnect the village correctly afterwards.

For me it just says the exchange name with no other details.

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charles 12 years ago

In my case it says I'm connected by cabinet 1. I know there are at least 4 cabinets between me and the exchange and a number further on, so why No 1?

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Huge 12 years ago

I believe ours are, too.

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Huge 12 years ago

Ahh, OK. Ignore my posting to John Rumm, mine says "Cabinet 3", so I assume we do have a cabinet. Perhaps. Maybe. As if I knew what that meant.

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John Rumm 12 years ago

Well that one says Exchange "CANEWDON is served by Cabinet 1" which is the first time I have seen one refer to a cabinet...

Still if the cabinet is actually in Canewdon, then its further away than the exchange itself!

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Andy Burns 12 years ago

I had to hang around all day for a BT (actually Quinn working on behalf of BT) bod to install a new line, turns out this *is* an EO line, it doesn't show up on the checker yet, but I'll see what it actually says, when it becomes "visible" within 24 hours ...

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Dave Liquorice 12 years ago

Well it doesn't tell me anything about "EO" or cabinet, just says "nnn on Exchange XXXX". It's also wildly out with the speed "ADSLmax Downstream Range(Mbps) 1 to 2.5 Mbps" current sync rate is a nice stable 6208 kbps, it has been over 7000 kbps but it struggles at that. Useable throughput is about 5 Mbps. Which is actually pretty good for a 3 km+ bit of ali.

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Andy Burns 12 years ago

The line I referred to being installed last week, and which the (working on behalf of) OpenReach chappie told me was EO, still isn't visible on the checker, so I can't say if it would actually say "EO" or just not mention a cabinet number to imply EO.

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