PILOON
Super Star Member
Well I had the opportunity TWICE over the last 48 hours to perform 'maintenance' runs on my genny.
First time we were blacked out for 3.5 hrs and a mere 6 hrs later hit again with an 8 hour blackout.
First incident was from a branch that blew the transformer fuse but took a fair bit of time to locate where.
2 nd incident was a blown transformer that knocked out some 150 clients while the earlier incident only affected 30 or so homes.
Problem here is that many power lines run thru the forest as power was installed before we had a road and later when road was made it followed the terrain vs the property lines.
That early hydro line was all laid using tracked 'muskegs' and boats.
Maintenance consists of cutting trees and that for a mere 25 ft 'right of way' and trees have a habit of growing much taller than hydro lines.
As a result being in a high elevation winds topple trees across the hydro lines.
Then to further vex us the telephone lines also get damaged.
Now also add that cellular service is very spotty due to the mountains.
So U call to report an outage and the recording says to go online (duh) and about 15 mins of useless info B4 you can actually make a report.
Like confirm no power??, your addy, do neighbors have light (can't see their house), check fuses, etc etc. press 1 to confirm addy, 2 to confirm something else etc.
LOL, all that frustration while holding a flashlight in order to read the phone keypad.
Heck if we had a medical emergency we'd need to wait until power was restored to call for an ambulance.
Now I have a water table problem and need to run my sump pump every 2 hours or so so I had to wake up 3 time during the night to do so and run the genset for 10 mins each time. That was no fun! OK, I have a digger out back and will cure the water table over the next few days.
First time we were blacked out for 3.5 hrs and a mere 6 hrs later hit again with an 8 hour blackout.
First incident was from a branch that blew the transformer fuse but took a fair bit of time to locate where.
2 nd incident was a blown transformer that knocked out some 150 clients while the earlier incident only affected 30 or so homes.
Problem here is that many power lines run thru the forest as power was installed before we had a road and later when road was made it followed the terrain vs the property lines.
That early hydro line was all laid using tracked 'muskegs' and boats.
Maintenance consists of cutting trees and that for a mere 25 ft 'right of way' and trees have a habit of growing much taller than hydro lines.
As a result being in a high elevation winds topple trees across the hydro lines.
Then to further vex us the telephone lines also get damaged.
Now also add that cellular service is very spotty due to the mountains.
So U call to report an outage and the recording says to go online (duh) and about 15 mins of useless info B4 you can actually make a report.
Like confirm no power??, your addy, do neighbors have light (can't see their house), check fuses, etc etc. press 1 to confirm addy, 2 to confirm something else etc.
LOL, all that frustration while holding a flashlight in order to read the phone keypad.
Heck if we had a medical emergency we'd need to wait until power was restored to call for an ambulance.
Now I have a water table problem and need to run my sump pump every 2 hours or so so I had to wake up 3 time during the night to do so and run the genset for 10 mins each time. That was no fun! OK, I have a digger out back and will cure the water table over the next few days.
