Power cut.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Been a bit of chaos at work the last couple of days - the power went off Wednesday lunch time, came back about an hour later (but only at 200v instead of 240v) - but then went again about an hour later. It wasn't restored until the early hours of Thursday morning, and not to all areas then.

Apparently the fault was an explosion in the 33,000V building at a sub-station a few miles away, which demolished much of the building and caused a fire as well.

Currently supplies are running from large generators scattered around the area, and it's assumed that will be the case for a good while until the sub-station is rebuilt. The mains is running about 257V today - bit on the high side.

I live in a different area, no problems at home

 

[picbits]

When I was an IT Manager, I used to dread power cuts.

Whenever the power came back on, there was always a surge which took out at least two computer PSUs - I had a cupboard full of spares just for that type of occasion !.

I also used to dread thunderstorms when I worked in Tandy. It was absolutely guaranteed that the day after the thunderstorm, there would be at least 10-15 telephones returned that had been killed by spikes.

 

[picbits]

Was it this one Nigel ?

https://www.itv.com/central-east/sub-station-explosion77693/

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Was it this one Nigel ?

https://www.itv.com/central-east/sub-station-explosion77693/

Yes, that's the one.

 

[Grossel]

Damn.

Can't view that because i'm not in uk. That's stupid as i'm living just a couple of sea windmills away from uk

 

[squishy36]

In the 80's I was a thin film engineer at a facility producing thin film devices. We had five inline machines used to coat substrates and the revenue loss when the power was out and these machines weren't working was $50k per hour per machine. Of course, a problem with typical coating (sputtering) machines is that the cryopumps would dump during the power failure and it would take hours to get the systems pumped back down when the power came back on. My boss's boss was so annoyed at the power downtime that he was able to convince site management & corporate to fund a $16M investment to build a brand new power line and substation into the company's site. Power outages went down more than an order of magnitude.

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

Yep, those cryopumps are a pain when they loose power. 5 min and your OK. If they happen to loose power when no one is there, then you have long start up times defrosting and regenerating.

We only had one pump and it had to be removed from the backup generator to make room for other devices.

We also had a few Polycolds, a liquid nitrogen eliminator without a closed loop water system. They just dumped lots of water down the drain.

Management had no interest in saving water or time.