Power Cut

[Chelsea14Ian]

Got back from the broads this afternoon, did washing made dinner,baths etc.Then about 19.15.The power went.Returning about two hours later.Pain in the backside.Don't know who's out of strictly? Plus its not warm.Don't know why the power went.

 

[grendel]

was it one of these incidents?

https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/power-cut/map?incidentid=INCD-116777-Z

 

[grendel]

there look to be a few in kent / london border at the moment

[Chelsea14Ian]

Think so.

[SPEEDTRIPLE]

A couple of years back, Karen and I went up to Kent for the weekend. While we were up there, the South East of England experienced some powerful thunder and lightning storms. When we arrived back here in Dorset, we found the power off and a BT engineer working up the pole outside our home. I asked him if it was due to his work, and was very surprised to hear the violent thunderstorm that caused it was late on the Friday night we left for Kent. Result, no leccy for 3 nights plus, one fried TV ariel booster, all the food in the fridge and freezer in the bin, but the worst thing was to find the phone junction boxes blown apart and dead phones, BUT the wi fi router had exploded and was all black and charred, we were lucky not to come home to a burned out shell. 

[Hylander]

38 minutes ago, SPEEDTRIPLE said:

A couple of years back, Karen and I went up to Kent for the weekend. While we were up there, the South East of England experienced some powerful thunder and lightning storms. When we arrived back here in Dorset, we found the power off and a BT engineer working up the pole outside our home. I asked him if it was due to his work, and was very surprised to hear the violent thunderstorm that caused it was late on the Friday night we left for Kent. Result, no leccy for 3 nights plus, one fried TV ariel booster, all the food in the fridge and freezer in the bin, but the worst thing was to find the phone junction boxes blown apart and dead phones, BUT the wi fi router had exploded and was all black and charred, we were lucky not to come home to a burned out shell. 

Now that is frightening.     

[ranworthbreeze]

I friend of mine and I went to our community centre yesterday morning to do a couple of repair jobs. This was delayed because we had no lights on in the main area's of the building. On testing the main breaker it was apparent that we had lost two of the three phases, we reported the fault and carried on with the jobs outside.

A couple of vans arrived and I talked with the engineers who told me that between 20 & 30 houses on the same road had been without power for 20 hours. A temporary repair was done  after digging two holes in the verges by the road to get power onto the houses, we allowed our 3 phases to be linked to get a temporary supply onto our building. All 3 phase breakers for motors were turned off. 

The repair  team should be back today to reinstate our 3 phase supply.

Regards

Alan

[grendel]

Nowadays its all about customer minutes lost, once the figure exceeds a certain number (dont ask me what that is) then the electricity supply company are charged by the regulator, so for example a single sainsburys store is a single customer and the electricity company would have longer to get them back on supply than the same equivalent load lost on 1000 individual houses (that are racking up the minutes lost by the thousand) this is one reason that my company dont allow the use of larger transformers than 1MVA (1000 KW) as if a transformer faults it keeps the minutes lost numbers down and 1MVA transformers are plentiful, whereas larger ones might have to be built to order. the other reason is that generators are available with sufficient output, so when a transformer fails a generator is put in place to get the customers back on supply, while the emergency team replace the faulty equipment. in congested areas such as london, there is a facility to link areas via the LV network to get customers back on supply, but this relies on spare capacity at the transformer (and is why we would rarely load a transformer much above 90% of its nominal capacity, the transformer can be run at 110% capacity for a short time, thus allowing 20% to be used to feed a neighbouring area)

[vanessan]

We had a similar experience to Speedtriple a few days before Christmas about 5/6 years ago. Also due to lightning strikes. We lost quite a bit of electrical stuff and took the opportunity of replacing all extension leads etc with surge protected leads. Well worth doing. 

[ranworthbreeze]

One of our customers Massarella had a similar lightening strike quite a few years ago. The PBX was in a cupboard in the stairwell of their head office. It fried all the phones, we had network cables running through the cupboard.

We had to replace the the modems, network cards in the PC's , ADSL routers and one of the network 24 way switches. We managed to get the network back up that day but BT took a couple of days to do their bit.

Regards

Alan

[Seagypsy]

2 minutes ago, ranworthbreeze said:

One of our customers Massarella had a similar lightening strike quite a few years ago. The PBX was in a cupboard in the stairwell of their head office. It fried all the phones, we had network cables running through the cupboard.

We had to replace the the modems, network cards in the PC's , ADSL routers and one of the network 24 way switches. We managed to get the network back up that day but BT took a couple of days to do their bit.

Regards

Alan

Is that the ice cream Masserella Alan, Mr Whippy was their horse

[ranworthbreeze]

Just now, Seagypsy said:

Is that the ice cream Masserella Alan, Mr Whippy was their horse

Yes it was, we used to act as System Supervisors for them for about 20 years.

Regards

Alan

[Chelsea14Ian]

Our power cut was total for,two hours. Two post codes.DA17 ours and DA7

[vanessan]

When we had ours, a couple of days before Christmas, it lasted for 4 or 5 days. Luckily we got reduced power back for those days, the oven worked fine (thankfully) but everything else was very poor - lighting etc. No heating because the circuit board had blown up, but the log fire did the trick. Our next door neighbours lost their power completely for the whole period. 

[SPEEDTRIPLE]

This is why we will only ever have a gas cooker, and a caravan kettle as a back up. I had gas in my flat, and could cook dinner and boil a kettle when others could'nt. Just a shame we never had a power out while I was there. 

[TheQ]

We used to lose power regularly until they replaced the overhead triple separate  wires with a twisted insulated triple. Since then we've had very few power failures. Though we had one last week of about an hour.

We keep a two burner and grill camping stove ready so we are OK if we need that.

We have a stove in the living room which will keep a kettle hot but not boil it.. Though not this week. I'm having to give it a rebuild after removing it's from place last Saturday to sweep the chimney.

[addicted]

in 1990 we moved to a place called Brookmans Park which was just north of London between Potters Bar and Hatfield thus much more rural than where we had previously lived in Winchmore Hill North London and presumably  a lot more of the supply equipment was external because we had far more incidents of Off Supply than before. I wrote to complain because it got so frequent and as we were often on the boat for several days at a time we relied on timers  to keep the house looking occupied and the power cuts naturally played havoc with them. Following my letter  I received a phone call one evening from an  area Director  of the Electricity board who explained to me that a lot of the power cuts were caused by Squirrels!

 

 

Carole

[grendel]

the big problem is where power lines go through woods, when the wind gets up the trees can either swing over to the wires causing them to touch one another, or branches can fall and break the lines, keeping the lines through woodland clear is a full time occupation with teams of guys with chainsaws removing branches etc that might fall and keeping the lanes through the trees clear. in clearer countryside large birds such as swans and geese are more a problem, flying into the lines near lakes as they land or take off.

[TheQ]

We've had the tree cutters in next doors garden trimming back a huge oak that the lines go through.

Before the wiring change we'd occasionally get a pheasant land on the wires and cause them to touch, causing a huge flash and a pheasant leaving in a hurry with much squawking..