My electric power was off this morning. Messages from the utility company.

P

Packard

Member
Joined
Nov 6, 2020
Messages
4,750
My electric was off this morning.  Our utility company has a fairly up-to-date messaging system.  I had an email on my phone that said, “We have detected a power interruption at 16 Edge Hill Road, starting at 7:30 a.m.  Power is expected to be restored by 10:30 a.m.  Click here to see outage map: xxxx.”

The map showed a fairly large ring that included my area.  It stated that my house and 829 of my neighbors houses had a power interruption. 

At about 10:00 a.m., I received another update (I was at Starbucks at the time).  I did not realize that squirrels were that destructive.

BG4OsPO.jpg


 
Packard said:
I did not realize that squirrels were that destructive.
Click to expand...

In cases like this (possibly getting into a pole-mounted transformer or something similar), they can be, but it's usually one-and-done for that individual squirrel.

Unless someone veered off the road to avoid a squirrel and took out a transmission pole, in which case the proximate cause was a squirrel, more or less.  I think Geico may have had a run of commercials about that sort of thing back in the day...
 
It seemed amusing.

A squirrel got in my childhood family house once.  When I entered the room he panicked.

He made directly to the nearest window, which was not the window he used to enter the house.  The window he bee-lined to was shut.  He chewed through about half of the window frame before my dad shooed him out the open window with a broom.

That squirrel-scar remained until my parents sold the house many years later.

So I knew they had destructive capabilities.  I just didn’t know it extended to electrical stuff.

**Speaking of which, my IPad’s screen has been dimming then brightening as I am typing.  It has a full charge, so maybe my IPad is on its way out too.
 
I doubt the squirrel was very happy about causing the power outage.  Not much fun getting between power and ground.....

Bob
 
So, do they announce these executions. or is it just random?  [blink]
Seems like they should warn you ahead of time, rather than waiting to state the clearly obvious?

I mean, you're sitting at home and the power goes out, do you really need the power company to tell you it's out? Back on? sure, not off. If you are there, you know. If you are not there, you can't do anything about it.

Sometime during the holiday weekend break, the power was off it the shop. Apparently 14 hours or so total. I tried to use my SCMS at about 7:30 and got nothing. I checked that it hadn't been unplugged while I was away, then went straight for the timer box. We have a mechanical timer that cuts power to most of the outlets in the shop every night about 1/2 hour after we leave. They come back on the next morning at 6am. The dial on the timer said it was just after 5PM. It only takes a second to fix it, but somebody has to.
 
Crazyraceguy said:
So, do they announce these executions. or is it just random?  [blink]
Seems like they should warn you ahead of time, rather than waiting to state the clearly obvious?

I mean, you're sitting at home and the power goes out, do you really need the power company to tell you it's out? Back on? sure, not off. If you are there, you know. If you are not there, you can't do anything about it.

Sometime during the holiday weekend break, the power was off it the shop. Apparently 14 hours or so total. I tried to use my SCMS at about 7:30 and got nothing. I checked that it hadn't been unplugged while I was away, then went straight for the timer box. We have a mechanical timer that cuts power to most of the outlets in the shop every night about 1/2 hour after we leave. They come back on the next morning at 6am. The dial on the timer said it was just after 5PM. It only takes a second to fix it, but somebody has to.
Click to expand...

Well, they (the squirrels) do usually announce the execution.  Usually there is a loud pop, sparks, sometimes a flame, and then a thud when they hit the ground.  Luckily at my previous house there was a fuse on the pole that only had to be replaced by the power company using a long pole.

How sad, but they just never seemed to listen when I told them to stay away...

Peter
 
Crazyraceguy said:
So, do they announce these executions. or is it just random?  [blink]
Seems like they should warn you ahead of time, rather than waiting to state the clearly obvious?

I mean, you're sitting at home and the power goes out, do you really need the power company to tell you it's out? Back on? sure, not off. If you are there, you know. If you are not there, you can't do anything about it.

Sometime during the holiday weekend break, the power was off it the shop. Apparently 14 hours or so total. I tried to use my SCMS at about 7:30 and got nothing. I checked that it hadn't been unplugged while I was away, then went straight for the timer box. We have a mechanical timer that cuts power to most of the outlets in the shop every night about 1/2 hour after we leave. They come back on the next morning at 6am. The dial on the timer said it was just after 5PM. It only takes a second to fix it, but somebody has to.
Click to expand...

The notifications have a purpose for the utility company.

I get an email that says my power is out.  I have no power.  So why bother telling me.  I know I have no power.

But now I know that the utility company knows I don’t have power.  I don’t have to call them and let them know.  That saves the utility company from having to answer 829 phone calls.

Then later I get an email that states that my power has been restored.  All is good.

Except my power has not been restored, and they are no longer trying to restore it.

Now I have to make that phone call.

So, it may make less sense for the homeowners than it does to the utility company.
 
On rare occasions we have the same issue here with possums, as they use the overhead wiring to get to all the houses.
 
If I was at work and got a text from the power company that the power was off at my home, I probably already received an alert from my NAS telling me it's shutting itself down from being on UPS for more than 5 minutes.  If it lasts long enough and nobody else is at home, I'll probably head that way to make sure that some other things are squared away, like ferreting refrigerated medications into a cooler with cold packs.

As Packard mentioned, it's nice to know that the power company is already aware of the outage so that I don't have to bother with calling myself.
 
I have apps on my phone for my power company and internet provider. Very useful for outages as mentioned. I've been among the first to press "report outage" but most times, I get there and they already have an estimate for when it will be fixed (for internet; I haven't had a power outage since the app).

My last power outage was less fun: walked outside and everybody else had power. Pop my service panel open to the unmistakable smell of arcing. The main breaker arced itself into oblivion. The thermo image was impressive!

 

Attachments

  • 2023-02-12 22.01.50.jpg
    2023-02-12 22.01.50.jpg
    1.5 MB · Views: 74
In a city the size of mine (1m+) they are on it quickly, but we all survived just fine for decades with no such notification. I remember, as a kid, when the power would only come back on exactly on the hour.
No automatic stitching. No matter what time it went off, you had to wait for the top of the hour. This was a safety thing for the linesmen, because of communication limitations of the day.

Here you have to report outages through the website, which doesn't take a person/switchboard to deal with it.
I haven't had a real outage in over a year, but I do get these funny "stumbles" once in a while. It will flicker on/off, sometimes only enough to bother the modem that runs my internet connection. Then I have to wait on that stupid thing to reboot, sometimes the WIFI needs to start again after the modem to get that connection going again too.
I have considered getting a UPS to keep this from happening, but haven't made the leap yet.

The only thing I could gain from being notified, while I wasn't there, is to save me from bothering to go there. Then I could go somewhere else.
I remember way back in the day we had a work around for this. Wired phones and answering machines. If the power was off, the phone would just ring (if no one was there) when the power came back, you would get the recording.
 
As a kid growing up a power outage was treated like a major event, and rarely happened that I can recall, nowadays the power's constantly sagging, being overloaded, and outages are a lot more common than they should be. The last several years we've routinely been getting warnings of outages during peak times in summer and winter, and they always make it sound dire. Of course that hasn't stopped the gov from closing down power plants and replacing them with supposedly "greener" energy that provides less output than the plants did at a cost of orders of magnitude more.

I ended up having to put my CNC and systems on a large UPS it was getting so unstable at times.
 
My kids had a paper route. Along the way they had a customer who had a dog. A very ferocious dog who came out for a paper delivery. I spoke with the customers about their dog. But the dog came out as soon as my kids get to the edge of the lawn with teeth showing.

One day, I accompanied my son as he delivered the papers. Sure enough, the dog was in the house. We were half way across the lawn when the dog was let out. He was out for blood. As he leaped for my son, a distributon box exploded on the pole. The dog spun around 180 degrees and hitailed it back to his house. My kids had free sailing forever after.
Tinker
 
About 40 years ago, I was walking my Doberman in the village of Roslyn (NY).  Something caught his eye and he was following it with interest.  I looked where he was looking and saw that he was a watching a Mylar helium balloon that had become untethered.  It’s flight path was erratic.

I also watched the balloon as it brushed up against the telephone pole with a transformer. 

I guess static electricity must have set it off because as soon as it touched the steel box, the balloon exploded. 

And the entire village went dark. 

A store owner came out to see what had happened and I said, ‘That transformer just blew.”

He said, “How do you know?”

I thought about it for a few seconds and decided it was simpler to say, “Just a guess.”  Saying “My dog told me so.”  sounded looney even to me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top