I get my power from Western Power Distribution and experience the occasional 'blip' and power outage (it's not just my property either, others in the area suffer at the same time). On looking at Western Powers' web site I see no logs, so am curious if their is any onus on the distributor to make any failures available to their customers, online or otherwise?
Thanks
Sustained faults are logged. Intermittent or transient faults (typically birds flying into o'h lines or lightning strikes on o/h lines) are handled by fully automatic switchgear and are not logged.
They publish Quality of Supply reports at
Highly unlikely to be available and they probably don't have remote reporting from all the 11kV fuses and auto reclosers in the distribution. If I call to report a failure within 5 mins of the power going off I more often than not get an "Oh thanks very much, where are you? How many of your neighbours are off? etc..."
How often have you been off, and for how long ?
Are you aiming towards getting a payment for the loss of supply per the guaranteed standards of service ?
AFAIK at present, the customer themselves have to claim, giving dates and times, although this flies in the face of the automatic payments that are supposed to trigger for other failures due under the standards.
Thanks for the replies.
There have been a few very brief (a few seconds) power blips in my area over the past few weeks (perhaps half a dozen such outages) and one sustained outage of about 3 hours.
Can I claim on the latter? Is it worth my while to do so (or is the recompense a pound or two)?
The brief blips are a pain as they invariably cause my PC to shut down incorrectly, once causing corruption that took me many hours to fix (that was about 3 weeks ago).
Get a UPS. They're not that expensive these days - you don't need a huge one to cover the power blips you're getting.
Obviously it also covers you against power outages for other reasons (fuses etc). It doesn't help you if you pull the power lead out of the PC with your feet though :-(
cheers, clive
I don`t think these count as being off supply - payments are normally only triggered by an outage of 18 hours or more afaik, BICBW :-}
If you`re back on within seconds, its likely an auto-recloser switching back in (they normally switch about 3 times before they lock out)
The longer outage might then have been to do post-fault maintenance on the breaker, depending on its type, or to get someone onsite to reset the auto-recloser.
Voice of experience ....
Dave
What about the Multiple Interruptions Standard ? or ar the DNO still trying to keep that secret!!
Hope you are well Colin
Regards
Steve Dawson
I couldn`t remember any specifics so I didn`t want to put my foot in my mouth as usual :-p (i`ve probably got an old copy of the standards on my PC somewhere, being the sad barsteward that I am :-} )
Not bad thanks - you ?
I keep thinking about it, but a little voice keeps telling me that as I'd be getting it due to the faults that Western Power are responsible for, then why should *I* pay for it? :)
Overhead lines feeding you? Sounds like tree growth tripping an auto recloser, this detects the fault disconnects the power for a second or two, then puts it back on, if the fault still exists it'll knock it off =
again. The auto recloser will lock out to the off state if it trips more= than say 3 times in a short period. It then needs a man to come out find= and fix the fault and reset the auto recloser.
With tree growth the blast from the intial contact often "prunes" the tree back so when the power is reapplied the fault no longer exists. Thi= s saves the trip out by a man but may well happen a few times during the growing season. An auto recloser is handy if lightning trips the supply =
as well, again no trip out by a man to restore supply for a transient fault.
ISTR that compensation doesn't normally kick in until you have been without power for 12hrs, it might not start for 24hrs though. You need t= o check with your supplier (or is this down to the distributer these days?= )
That is what a UPS is for, a small cheapo one with auto shutdown softwar= e for your PC is around =A340. Even at the minimum wage it would have paid= for itself in your saved time...
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