Colin Wilson wrote:
Ah, I suspected as much - you'd have thought it'd work out cheaper for
them in the long run to diagnose and fix it properly, but I guess they
have bigger fish to fry.


I`m not sure whether multiple outages of a shorter period may class as
claimable under the guaranteed standards for loss of supply - IIRC any
more than 4 outages in a year bags you a payment, but you have to
claim it yourself - its not an automatic payment.

It's not the outages that are the problem. We get a couple per year and
you cope with this (learning not to buy mains-only telephone answering
machines for example). The point is that a normal outage sees the power
restored to everything in the house when the main supply is restored.

It is having the consumer unit trip off that is the bigger worry. Even
if the main supply comes back after 30 seconds outage, if the consumer
unit has tripped, then there is no power to anything in the house until
someone realises there is a problem and manually resets the consumer unit.

And if there is nobody at home when the unit trips, the house stays
unpowered until someone comes back - to find everything in the freezer
wrecked if they have been away for more than about 24 hours.

John Geddes