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I live in a somewhat rural area and we got bit hard by this last winter. Our road used to have a handful of houses on it but now has around 85 (a mix of smalle
by _heimdall 2y ago
I live in a somewhat rural area and we got bit hard by this last winter.
Our road used to have a handful of houses on it but now has around 85 (a mix of smaller lots around an acre and larger farming parcels). Power infrastructure to our street hasn't been updated recently and it just barely keeps up.
We had a few days that didn't get above freezing (very unusual here). Power was out for about 6 hours after a limb fell on a line. The power company was actually pretty quick to fix it, but the power went out 3 more times in pretty quick succession.
Apparently a breaker kept blowing as every house regained power and all the various compressors surged on. The solution at the time was for them to jam in a larger breaker. I hope they came back pretty quickly to undo that "fix" but we still haven't had any infrastructure updates to increase capacity.
- alvah 2y ago"The solution at the time was for them to jam in a larger breaker" I've seen some cowboy sh!t in my time but jeez, that's rough.
- cr125rider 2y agoThat’s “it can’t keep tripping if I jam in a penny instead” level of engineering from the utility! Wow!
- cudgy 2y agoGood thing none of your houses burnt down.
- corint 2y agoIt'd have likely been the equipment in the street. That said, in Winter, you can overload this a bit. After all the failure mode would be the wires getting so hot they begin to melt. If you know they're covered in ice, or are currently being rained on in near-freezing air temperatures, you can push more current than they'd be able to at 2pm on a hot summer's day.