Power Cuts

Do any of you have many power cuts these days?

We had one last night from about 10PM until about 2AM this morning. It just suddenly all cut out, and unusually the whole neighbourhood was out too, so it wasn't just a single sub station and must have been a larger problem.

It flickered back on for a few minutes at about 11PM and then went out again, so their were either attempting to restore it, or it was something like a fallen tree on a power line.

We have also had a couple more power cuts in recent months, only lasting a few hours each at most. But before this I couldn't remember the time we have any in years.

Here in Lisbon area, when we have heavy rain sometimes the power goes off, but normaly only for 30 minutes...

Not here. We did get a few a few years ago but I don't think we've had one for ages. They certainly aren't common.

Out here we get brownouts quite often, and short powercuts from time to time. Not what I'd say common, but way more that we ever got in the UK of recent times (seems like, in the UK, we had quite a few in the 80s/ early 90s but hardly any when I was a young adult - although that could be me misremembering).

My friends that live further out in the sticks have them more often - they had a 12 hour biggie just the other weekend when we were over for a barbecue. They aren't on 'town water' so have to collect rain water and have a clean water tank. When the power goes, the pump is off no water at all - so we all had to pee up a tree in the garden - luckily they have a fair bit of space out there. Dunno what happens if they need to take a dump.

We had a cable internet cut recently for about 12 hours. Some scumbags had stolen a load of copper wire and metals from a junction box, taking down a wide area. At least that's what we were told, unless it's a standard excuse like leaves on the line for trains! :D

Damn the high value scrap metal market.

I wonder if they are after power cables now? Hope it fries them if so!!!! :mad:

There are frequent power cuts in my area which plays havoc with servers and computers left on overnight. The worst one was around 4pm which took out an entire village for around 5 hours, it was like driving through a warzone with all the house alarms going off together and darkness everywhere!

Anyone had any more power cuts recently?

We had two last monday. It went off at about 2am, and I was woken up by the sound of a nearby alarm.

All the streetlights were out. About half an hour later some of the streetlights on nearby streets came back on, followed by ours a few minutes later.

Then on monday evening, it went off again just before I was about to eat my dinner. Fortunately I had finished with the electric oven 5 minutes earlier.

We're on overhead powerlines, so it can happen a fair bit.

We had a 5 hour cut about two weeks ago when the weather was terrible and we had quite a bit of local flooding. I'd taken in for granted in the London suburbs, we vary rarely had cuts, but here it is more frequent (maybe 3 or 4 a year, but not enough to be troublesome).

How many distribution companies do you guys have over there? I work for one in Aus, and eliminating all outages is quite hard! Trees are a real pain in the @ss!