On 27/02/2014 08:15, Dave Baker wrote:
In the 25 years I lived in my last house in southern suburbia I can
count the number of times the lecky went out on the fingers of one
heavily mutilated hand. Since moving to the middle of feckin nowhere in
Aberdeenshire it's been about a dozen times in 18 months.

We started off with a spate of them in 2012, then it settled down for a
while, we had another one last back end and then it went out for an hour
and a half yesterday again. Several have been in the middle of the night
where I only realise it happened because the clock on the cooker is
flashing and has lost its settings when I get up.

I'd assumed it was just some specific fault on a wire local to our
little enclave here which some bugger really ought to get round to
fixing properly but finally I phoned up the power company yesterday when
the phone started working again and it had knocked out the power to 352
houses over a several mile area and was reported in as "an explosion at
the top of a power pole in someone's garden".

He also looked up the previous outage and that was over a wide area too.
So no general problem with our local supply, just sod's law it seems.
Branches falling onto cables etc.

So I'm happy it isn't just my house or its supply but surprised it
happens so often. Is this just a "living in the sticks" sort of thing we
have to get used to?

Yep. When I worked for an electricity board, the rural areas always got
a lot more outages than the urban areas, even though some of the latter
also had overhead distribution lines. Rural overhead lines are a lot
longer, much more exposed to damage, more difficult to inspect
(helicopter surveys were expensive and restricted to the major lines)
and often more difficult to reach when they do need repair.

Colin Bignell