Power To The People!

Just about 45 years ago, some electrician buried the power lines that have supplied electricity to our house, which was then under construction. The underground conduit runs about 150 feet from a terminal box at the southeast corner of our lot, near the street, to the meter mounted on the west side of our house. Unlike overhead power lines, nothing goes wrong with the underground lines.

But then something did go wrong.

 

Three insulated cables are in the conduit. Call them A, B, and Ground. The voltage on A is 115 Volts as measure to the Ground. The voltage on B is 115 Volts. These A and B voltages are out of phase with one another, such that the voltage between A and B is 230 Volts. In the house, there are a bunch of 115 Volt circuits, some of which use A and some of which use B. And then there are a few 230 Volt circuits which connect to both A and B.

 

On April 8, we woke up to find that some of our lights and outlets were working and some were not. In the breaker box, I used my voltmeter to find that A had its full 115 Volts, but B had zero volts. The circuits fed by B were the dead ones.

 

Ameren Missouri supplies our power, and they have a pretty good system to report outages online. Within an hour, a guy called to say he was on the way but had to finish up some task nearby first. Another half-hour went by and a guy showed up with everything he would need to restore our power. He verified that the B cable was dead at the meter. He took the cover off the terminal box near the street to find that the B cable was very much alive there. Then he got a big coil of cable from his truck and connected one end to the terminal box and the other end to the meter box at the house. He ran the new cable across the driveway, through the grass.

 

Voila! We have power! And a big ugly cable running across the lawn.

 

Ameren will, at some point (couple of weeks from now?), send a crew out with an instrument capable of finding the break in Cable B, showing them where to dig. Dig they will. They will make quite a mess to uncover the bad spot in Cable B a couple or three feet down, make a repair, and then restore the lawn to some semblance of presentability. 

 

Presumably, the cable now stretching across our lawn will go back in their truck for a future use. 

 

Presumably, I will have some work to do to restore the lawn to the standard I have set, which is likely a bit higher than the one Ameren has set.

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Postscript: Ameren crew showed up, having given me no prior notification, to repair the buried cable on April 13. I was driving home from Chicago at the time, so I was not able to see what kind of problem they discovered when they dug. When I got home, they had obviously dug a hole about 18 inches square and restored the sod as best they could. The temporary cable was gone. Power was on in the house. All is well.