A week or so back we had complaints from a handful of people saying their power was blinking. We spent 2 days looking for that needle in the haystack, yet during those two days we had no blinks. The first day we spent looking for obvious stuff and the second was getting that fin tooth comb out and seeing what we could find. Then we found the issue... or should I say issues
We ended up finding a 3 poles in a farmer’s freshly planted field that had 15 of these dead-end insulators that need changed in a bad way. Up close it is easy to identify, but with a freshly disced and planted field plus a good amount of rain... getting out to these poles wasn’t in the cards the first day. We look for the obvious first. This is the quickest way to solve the problem. Then we go to every pole and glass them over, (use binoculars) this is still faster than climbing or flying a bucket up to every pole.
The weirdest thing is, after finding these 15 failed insulators (they looked very bad and were assumed to have failed) we didn’t have any complaints since then.... and it had rained and the wind had blown but the lights didn’t blink... I guess the recipe wasn’t exactly right for the power to blink... weird... just weird?!?!? But... that is a good thing because due to other outages and jobs we weren’t able to get to it for a week or so. Granted if we would have got any calls those jobs would have been pushed back. With the silence, we were really confused... Trying to get big trucks into the soaked, freshly disced and planted field, not fun. We could have climbed the poles and done it out of the hooks but nobody was calling in and complaining about the lights blinking. So...
Sorry no actions picks this time. My hand were full of various hotsticks and didn’t have the time to sneak some shots in. Plus it was freezing and I had gloves on, gloves and smartphones don’t really work. I was able to snap these few photos when we first got in the air and got to looking at things. Getting a plan of attack
Just to compare, here is a photo of a good insulator and a bad insulator... Some of the ones we have ran across done have any skirts on them at all. It’s just a fiberglass rod.
We have another handful of them to change but we can open and close the line in a few different places and de-energize this pole that has 6 insulators on it. That way the apprentice can spend some time in the hooks. The other 2 poles will be hot on the back side so ya, Journeyman Lineman are gonna have to handle those.
This isn’t a photo from this day but I figured I would share it anyway just to give an idea of how these insulators are changed. A sling around the pole or arm, An insulating link stick, a hoist, and a hot stick to operate the handle of the hoist. Getting the cotter keys and pins out is always fun... especially at the end of an 8 foot hot stick. Well that just gave me an idea for my next post. A tool of the trade post is coming soon!!
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