Due to the economic crisis my extremely wealthy city has decided to once again postpone burying the power lines underground.. Beautiful multi million dollar properties have their trees butchered and unsightly power lines running along the streets. Some of the power poles date from the 1930’s
In the last year I’ve lost power to my house 22 times.. sometimes briefly sometimes for days.. the vast majority of homeowners have underground power from the street. only the power lines on the street are overhead..
The power company claims that buried lines don’t ensure more reliable power. I need something that will counter their claims..
Replies
Not a counter to the claim, lots of underground installation had problems due to rain and flooding.
If the wires and pole were sky blue---
Just so I understand this, your power company draws on it's decades of experience to claim that underground distribution has essentially the same reliability as aerial distribution. You, however, want to develop an argument that will blow them out of the water and (I assume) show them up for the lying, cheating, crooked, double dealing, lowlife, SOB's they really are? Do I have that about right? - lol
I never worked for a power company, but based on the several years I worked on aerial and underground telephone and fiber optic systems, I gotta agree with your power company. There are advantages (and disavantages) to both in terms of initial costs, operating and maintenance costs, etc, but reliability is roughly the same. IMHO, the biggest advantage of underground utilities is not seeing all those poles, wires, splice cases, downguys, etc. IOW, it's purtyier. - lol
If your subdivision is laid out originially with UG cabling it is nice. However, retrofitting an existing subdivision requires locating accurately and excavating safely around water, sanitary sewer, fiber optic, and gas lines AND putting up with the destruction and re-paving of utility cuts in asphalt and concrete roadways.
Been there, surveyed for it, and it's a PITA for the HO's and the contractors.
Be careful what you wish for...
Reliability isn't the big issue, it's the installation cost. Putting them underground costs a lot more money, and any maintenance required in the future is more expensive as well. Plus, as mentioned by others retrofitting underground power lines into an old, existing neighborhood is a lot of work (and considering the narrow and winding streets around your house it would be a LOT of work. :) ) I suppose one could debate the lifetime cost for a wooded area like yours where falling tree branches require a lot of extra repair, but I suspect it would still come out cheaper for the power company to leave them overhead.
Minneapolis is going through the same thing right now - Xcel Energy wants to install a new transmission line going east-west across town along 29th street; they want to put it overhead and the city council is pushing to have it underground. The problem is that it will cost something like $19 million more to bury.
had my UG power line chopped by (get this) the Pwr Co contractors last summer. They spliced it, power back on in an hour or so.
This summer had one leg fail 2 different times from 2 different splices they put in to get the power here. grrrrrr...
But I believe that the costs is the issue as opposed to the reliability. I think when they chopped the feeder with the excavator it stressed the other splices to induce a failure later.
Neighboring city has a federal grant to pay for putting house drops underground from the city POCO.Of course this varies, but I have heard that in this area most of the problems where with trees taking out house drops and not the distribution lines.Anyway the asked a friend of mine if she wanted one put in to a rental house that she has in that area.The contractor that the city hired trenched right through the sewer connection. Found out that the wasn't the only place where the contractor did more damage than what they fixed..
William the Geezer, the sequel to Billy the Kid - Shoe
sometimes when UG feeders are repaired a little water gets into the strands of the cable and when the cables get re-energized that water will begin to get warm and travel through the cable until it finds a place to weep out, so if there are any splices and the insulating material is just a bit thin or maybe the jacket has a pinhole in it, the water can escape, if the cables are heavily loaded the water can become steam..which makes a pinhole a little bit bigger then the cables might cool because the load is decreased and water then creeps back in, the cycle repeats until the corrosion is bad enough to cause a fault then BOOM and the POCO comes and fixes it throws it back in the ground where the cycle begins again.
.
.. . . . . . . .
that makes a lot of sense.
I never did get up close to the guys doing the repairs but how do the locate the break in the UG feeder? I saw something that they were putting on the ground but no details.
there are a few different transmitters with most of those units, some work on energized circuits while other do not one type clamps directly onto the bare termination at the transformer or a break, another merely clamps around the wire ..... useful in a manhole or cable vault . they turn it on and walk around till they pick up that signal and continue walking around till they map out the path, some of the locators can indicate depth as well..
.
.. . . . . . . .
yeah, but is that how they find the breaks in burried feeders?
Yep, transmit an RF signal on top of any 60Hz voltage there. You'll be able to detect the break in the line when the signal drops off.Another approach is time-domain reflectometry -- essentially radar. Send a blip down the wire and measure how long it takes to bounce back. The time delay tells you how far away the problem is, and the "sense" of the blip tells you whether it's an open or a short. Would even be able to detect a partly bad splice this way.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -John Kenneth Galbraith
dont forget to include the 'thumper' method
You mean, if you see Thumper dead on the lawn the break is likely right below him?
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -John Kenneth Galbraith
thanks Dan. that kind of technology always fascinates me.
mostly those types would be for locating it before it blows uo
cable fault locators are a different type of tool but basically operate the same way that is by inducing a signal into the ground some of those units will have arrows that will point you in the right direction to find the fault
sophisticated you bet,
not at all like this next one another way that works well in the Winter, at least on 480 volt temporary is to look for the steam coming out of the ground or a muddy swamp when the air temp is around -10 it is right then you're the guy who gets the shovel nice warm mud all over you and the tools which then begins to refreeze almost at once, and those were good times.
.
.. . . . . . . .
Frenchy, I'm really surprised at all the negativity. My house was 17 years old when we moved in 12 years ago. It has undergound electric coming in. We are set back on a cul-de-sac over 300'. During a thunderstorm we have had it drop off for about a second and then come right back on. It never was down for any amount of time. I love it.However, now that I've bragged on it, who knows? :>]
>is to look for the steam coming out of the ground or a muddy swamp<
LOL, nothing like the abvious
All underground raceways are "wet" locations. The question is not if they will fill with water, just how soon and how deep.
Several years ago, we had to pump out a large telephone company manhole in the mud flats near SF Bay. It took 3-4 hours to pump it down and we had to keep pumping while the cable pulling crew pulled in a new cable. Water was flowing in almost as fast as it was being pumped out.
yes they are but I was referring to direct burial either way splices are always prone to failure underground.
.
.. . . . . . . .
Most of the power cables in the UK are underground. We have a minimum of power outages, often when the cable is damaged by a backhoe.
It was once proposed to buy electricity from Iceland (where they can generate it cheaply with geothermal) and have it transmitted to the UK by undersea cable. The technology is there, if the power companies choose to use it.
I think they are judging reliability differently than you. They are thinking about the length and cost of outages, not the frequency.
Overhead is fast and cheap to fix. Underground might not fail as often but when it does the fix is slow and costly. As another poster mentioned "backhoe fade" is the most frequent fault.
We have another problem here. The right of ways are pretty full right now and digging another trench in front of everyone's house may not be possible. Part of "cost" is "risk". The risk of hitting the Telco's fiber or a gas line will sure ratchet up your installation cost.
Our power lines are above ground, as are those in most of the town. The only place where all the lines are buried is out in the swanky neighborhood near the golf course. We have maybe one power outage a year, usually during a thunderstorm.
Back when we first moved here (32 years ago) we had power outages at least once a month, but then they beefed up the transmission lines coming into town and it improved enormously.
I don't want to jinx myself but so far in this "Epic" ice storm that we are having the only people I know without power are the ones with underground service. Our pole lines in this town have been redone and beefed up in the last ten years. That new subdivision that I was going to move to is all underground. They lose power everytime there's a storm.
I'm very happy with pole lines at the moment. :)
I'm bringing sexy back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yIqwyR1ays
We did have an ice storm in town about 20 years ago that knocked out our power for about 24 hours and brought down a lot of service connections, especially in the older neighborhoods. And out in the country SW of here there was an ice storm about 10 years back which had some people out of power for 2 weeks or so. I don't think that anything is immune to a severe ice storm, especially when it brings down a lot of trees.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. -John Kenneth Galbraith
could you facter in that houses will be worth more if power lines are underground thus property tax higher , revenue
sure The fact that overhead powerlines detract from the apearance of the community reduces the value of those homes..
Frenchy,
How's this analogy. Buried utilities are like the female organs. High maintenance if things go wrong but they are nicer to look at.
Male organs are like the power lines overhead. Low maintenance but ugly. Prone to damage from trauma. I could keep this up but analogies and metaphors get weaker the longer you try to sustain them.
This subject has had a lot of responses, so I don't know if this will be read, but I don't think that above ground or under ground means anything, even in an Arkansas ice storm , since a power loss at one point won't discriminate down the line, above or below ground. I once lived in a northern Chicago suburb, in a cornfield sub-division, and we had so many outages during storms that I was about to buy a back up generator. It had underground utilities. I got to move since into a 30's house in Wisconsin with overhead utilities from the alley. Never have had a problem. I even bought a new pole (utility rules) so as to have the lines not cross an area where I wanted a new sun porch built. I'm still designing the plaque to put on my pole. Maybe I'll carve it into a totem when I retire in a couple of months. It is my pole, after all. I paid for it, right? I'm sure that the utility company will appreciate this principle. Or maybe not.