Power cut...

[smashngrab]

Just before Christmas we had a power cut,so i look outside and the house each side of us has power.A bloke over the road comes out and asked me whats going on because his was off as well.

How come the whole Road didn't go off ? why is it radom like that.

I phoned up the local power number and they said it will be back on in an hour,and fairplay it was.

 

[Spark123]

The houses down the street are usually split between the three phases, your neighbour to the left may be on red, you on yellow and the neighbour to your right on blue. If the fuse blows in the yellow phase yours will go off but your neighbours not. Everyone else on yellow will also go off i.e. every 3 doors or so.
(old terminology used as the DNO still use RYB or R, Y, B or for some reason ours uses G instead of Y too)

 

[westie101]

The vast majority of cables fed from the LV network are 3 phase i.e. 3 live cores, a neutral and an earth.
The phases are supplied by their own fuses, it is quite common for only one fuse to blow so only 1/3 of the properties loose supply.
I would suggest this is what happened in your case

 

[Spark123]

Why do they use G instead of Y Westie?

 

[westie101]

Why do they use G instead of Y Westie

Historic, before R,Y,B were standardised Y could be either G or W or Y!! It depended on the pre-nationalisation distribution organisation (either private companies or councils).
As stuff is still marked with those colours we tend to still use whichever standard is common in a particular location. So all the different standards can be in use. To get joints and connections right we do however mark them with L1, L2, L3 which cuts across all the colour conventions

The biggest difficulty on older cable can be the neutral which can be a number of different colours and markings. We see green/yellow, blue, black numbered 0 on older paper cables, so we always have to prove it electrically before making a connection.

 

[ebee]

Westie,
do you sometimes find the split is per third street or per third block rather than every third house?

 

[westie101]

Generally every third house as this also serves to keep the neutral current down. In older networks there are all sorts of weird and wonderful (to us now) ideas, with single phase cables doing as you suggest.
We also have a large number of areas with underground cabling but with mural (overhead style) wiring. These are generally on ex-council house stock so it will have been a cost cutting exercise

 

[ljarrald]

i think our house was built in the 20s.
its on an EX council estate and we rarely have power cuts (usually only one every couple of years) but i remember once when there was a storm, every single streetlamp that i could see went out, then they came back on, then every house i could see went off then came on, and then EVERYTHING went off for about 3 hours. it was weird. it was totally black everywhere in the middle of manchester!