Power cuts

Sometimes I wonder whether Yorkshire is in fact in a "developed" rich G8 country at all. I realise it is not so widespread these days but I certainly don't live out in the sticks, yet we still have six or so power cuts each year. Unfortunately this one is a little different.

The electrical power went off at 18:10 and appeared to come back on at 18:13. However, none of the low energy light bulbs came back on, the sodium street lighting did not recover and displays such as the microwave appeared very dim. I checked on my UPS and saw the incoming voltage was only 88VAC, as opposed to the usual 240VAC.

One other thing of note. Although the DECT telephone bases appeared to be alive there was not enough transmitter power for any of the handsets to function. That's why it's important to have an ordinary line-powered phone in case of emergency.

Speaking of emergency planning, it would be good to know who supplies your electricity(!). A torchlit search of the Phone Book turned up nothing for Yorkshire Electricty and I eventually found out that we're supplied by "CE Electric UK". At 18:40 I managed to report the fault on 0800 375 675 and was told an engineer had been despatched.

Normal power was restored at 19:42. So for 89 minutes we suffered a major and sustained brown-out. Fortunately I realised what was happening and switched everything off at the Consumer Unit, (hopefully) before any damage was done to my own equipment. Thankfully nothing was damaged save for a couple of 5A fuses that proudly died in action.

Of course any device that does not manage its input power will have been suffering, anything with motors being prime candidates. 88VAC suggests that somewhere upstream two phases have failed. All those poor fridges!

At least it was a good test for the "business continuity" of my core network devices. I'm blogging this in the dark from my laptop and am still connected wirelessly to my ADSL. :-)

(I've used italics above to highlight post-mortem editing of this post.)