Posts Tagged ‘electrical problem’
No Fix
It’s official. The splice in the power wire to the barn was not the point of failure. Where does that leave things? Right where I didn’t want them. The electricians were unable to tell me where the break in the buried wire might be occurring.
For the time being, I have chosen to continue to rely on one “hot” line providing 120VAC to all the circuits in the barn. That is the way we have been operating since the problem initially occurred in January, and it has proved to be sufficient.
Since we haven’t been able to come up with an explanation for the failure of the one line, I’m concerned about the potential risk of the other line suffering the same fate, which would leave us with no power at all in the barn. The guys said they see this kind of thing with a surprising regularity.
Apparently, there is a lot more going on underground than I realized. The causes they’ve seen include tree roots, burrowing critters, and rocks pushing their way into the wires.
My plan, at this point, is to live with the risk. If the remaining power line suddenly fails, we will run an above-ground extension cord until we can get scheduled to have new wires bored beneath the driveway. I asked for a quote for the expense of this work and learned that although it wouldn’t be cheap, it would be less than I anticipated.
We will be saving up for that eventuality. Hopefully, we’ll have years to tuck away the funds.
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Where’s Winter?
Warmth continues to dominate our weather patterns halfway through December. A headline in the paper this morning boldly reads, “Historic El Niño could be the strongest in 75 years.” Well, I’ll be.
Yesterday morning, I hurried to retrieve the garbage bin in advance of the arrival of the electrician(s) who were going to diagnose my loss of power in the barn.
I hastily parked the bin on the asphalt just beyond the turnoff to the barn and returned to tending to the horses. As minutes dragged on toward an hour of waiting, I returned to the house and took the bin with me, thinking that would result in the electricians showing up.
When that didn’t work, I went back out again and at the spot where I had temporarily left the garbage bin, I spotted something bright green on the ground. Thinking it might be a plastic piece of the bin, I bent down to pick it up. To my surprise, it moved, curling into a circle.
A caterpillar! In December!? Yikes. Me thinks our environment is reflecting the continued warming of the planet. The little guy didn’t even have a wooly coat on. Whatever trees or plants it consumes will be under greater pressure if creatures that feed on them don’t die off over winter. How is the caterpillar not freezing when the temperature drops overnight?
The guys eventually showed up nearly two hours after the expected time and quickly deduced the power is being lost somewhere underground between the shop and the barn. Two clues point toward likely possibilities.
There was a pile of disturbed dirt from a burrowing critter in the barn below the circuit breaker box where the pipe of wires comes out of the ground. There is also a known splice in the wires from 11 years ago when a skid steer cut them during the making of a drive-able thoroughfare around the back of the barn.
With the ground frozen enough to make digging difficult, revealing the status of that splice may need to wait until next spring. The ground inside the barn wasn’t solid like a rock, so I took a crack at digging in there.
I made it down to the bottom of the pipe and quit when there was no evidence of burrowing down that far. The wires are barely visible at the bottom of the hole and appear free of damage.
To help us out until I can dig for the splices, the electricians rearranged circuit breakers so they all connect to the single phase of 120V AC available. Power usage in the barn isn’t high enough to overload one phase and we aren’t currently using 240V for anything so this works for now.
Whatever failed on the one line could just as easily occur on the remaining line so this is something we want to fix even though the temporary solution is providing everything we need for now.
Since winter isn’t delivering its worst this year, maybe I’ll find an opportunity to dig outside sooner rather than later. However, I’m hesitant about making a big digging mess that I wouldn’t be able to clean up until much later and it didn’t sound like the electricians were very interested in repairing the splice during the winter months (hoping that truly is the problem).
Most likely, we’ll wait and see.
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Missing Phase
So, yesterday I wrote about the stability I have enjoyed throughout my life. That would include infrastructure, which isn’t exactly what I was referring to in my rambling sermon. When it snows, our roads get plowed. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I toggle a switch, the lights come on. Except when they don’t.
My current perception of stability was rocked on Tuesday when I flipped the two switches for lights in the barn and only one set came on. I’ve seen incidences where a circuit breaker fails. That would be easy for me to fix.
It’s not the circuit breaker. It is something I cannot fix. One of the phases of 120V AC coming into the master circuit breaker in the electrical box in the barn is no longer live. Zero voltage.
Since the source of this power is after or beyond our electric co-op’s meter, they do not provide service. That falls on their members to contact an electrician for help. The person I spoke with at the co-op was as helpful as possible in providing information to aid me in deciding what to do next.
The most unsettling thing I learned was that burrowing critters do indeed contribute to underground electrical line failures. He said that when cable insulation gets chewed to expose conductors, the wires can begin to corrode and eventually even turn to dust.
As a result of that, he told me the co-op now runs wires through piping between transformers and homes when doing new installations. Doing so has significantly reduced these kinds of problems.
Lovely.
What are our chances of finding an electrician who happens to have time to just show up when we call?
Well, pretty good, actually. The first company I contacted said “Joe” would call me back as soon as he had a moment. Based on previous experience, I fought my fears that I wouldn’t hear from him for days, if at all.
Cyndie encouraged me to send him love in advance. I sent the whole company love.
An hour or two later, I got the call and he immediately asked if it was a dairy barn and whether it was urgent, or not. When I admitted it wasn’t urgent but we did have horses and the power keeps their water from freezing, he said they would come out first thing in the morning.
We couldn’t be more pleased about that.
Does it work if we send the underground electric cable love?
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Relative Something 