Ongoing Power Outages
Over the past year or two, we’ve experienced numerous short-duration power outages. One destroyed my wireless router and another triggered a hard drive failure in a computer here in the office. I’ve reported three of these two- to five-second power failures to Penelec, our electricity company. So far, they’ve not fixed the problem. A technician came by last year when I first called in the issue and said that he talked to the neighbors and verified that they too experienced the outages. However, he was not optimistic about correcting this anytime soon due to its intermittent nature.
From now on, I’ll use this post to detail our progress in bringing this issue to closure, and hope that this can be resolved quickly.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
02:50 PM: Power outage occurred. Several minutes later, I called Penelec’s customer service number and explained the ontoing nature of this situation. The fellow said that he’d have an engineer call me back soon to figure out how to solve this.
October 29th, 2009 at 9:00 am
12:00 PM: Engineer Bill returned my call I put in yesterday, this morning. He said that they’re aware of the frequent outages and that they’ve done a thermal scan of the circuits. Unfortunately, this has revealed no cause of the problem. So, they’re placing line monitors throughout the circuit to help pinpoint the cause. In the meantime, he gave me his telephone number at work and asked that I let him know any time these outages happen.
Also, he suggested that in order to minimize damage from any spikes or surges that might result from these outages, he suggested the following:
* Add whole-house surge protection;
* Assure that the ground terminals of the cable, telephone, and power systems are all bonded together. This should prevent any dangerous voltages from appearing between these systems.
* Finally, make sure every important appliance has surge protection.
October 29th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Another outage just happened several minutes ago at 12:26 PM EDT. I reported it to engineer Bill from Penelec; lef him voice mail per his instructions.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Verified a good connection between the ground outside and the staked ground wire that grounds our main power panel; I stuck one meter probe into the moist dirt near the stake, and touched the other to the copper wire clamped to the stake. Resistance: less than one ohm.
However, I have determined that the cable and telephone grounds are not bonded (connected) to the power ground. They may have been when we employed all-copper plumbing. However, since our pipes are now PVC, any ground connection there was to the cable was probably lost during this upgrade. Though the telephone box has its own ground stake, it appears that it too is not connected to the power line ground. So, per Bill’s instructions, I’ll make these connections next.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Bill, the Penelec engineer called back a few minutes ago, and said that the outage I reported at 12:26 PM came from an animal contacting a power line. He said that when this occurs, where possible, they install animal guards around transformer contacts on poles. Unfortunately in this case, installing this sort of protection cannot be done. But he advised to keep calling and that they’ll work to at least reduce the occurrences of these outages.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:19 am
09:06 AM: Another short-duration outage just happened. I phoned Bill and let him know.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:15 am
10:01 AM: Another short-duration outage just happened. I phoned Bill and let him know. He says that he’s awaiting approval to change a few settings on some equipment that delivers power to this area, and thanked me for the update. Very cordial.
01:50 PM: Bill called to say that they’re making the adjustments to the substation equipment on 2009-11-20, to make the fault detection circuitry less sensitive to transient current spikes such as what happens when a squirrel gets across the high voltage lines. This should reduce the frequency of the outages if not eliminate them altogether.
November 18th, 2009 at 10:24 am
12:22 PM: Connected all phone and cable lines through surge protectors, to keep my equipment safe when an outage occurs whether short or long duration. Also, added a surge protector to my printer and shredder in the office.
November 20th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
05:00 PM: Today, Penelec is supposed to make adjustments at the substation up the road here, the net effect of which should be to reduce the occurrences of these outages. Hopefully, we’ll get these down from a few each month to a couple each year (or less).
05:05 PM: Picked up and installed three surge protectors throughout the house, on today’s shopping trip.
December 6th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
07:05 PM: So far, no outages have occurred since the adjustments discussed above have been made to the substation equipment. Hopefully, this problem is solved. Time will tell.
December 21st, 2009 at 3:07 pm
05:05 PM: No power outages for over a month now. This suggests even more strongly that the equipment adjustments applied on 2009-11-20 have reduced the incidents of these outages.
April 14th, 2010 at 6:28 am
08:50 AM: We experienced a small outage just now.