Rude Awakening

Topper

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Well the day got off to a bad start, I had a fit full night's sleep (if you could call it that) having run out of my medication, managed to fall asleep about 5.00am, was very aware that I had set my mobile phone alarm for a visit to the doctors. As you do, I was worried I would oversleep so got up around seven had a quick shower and then the electric went off. It was off in Blackburn and surrounding villages, It was off here for about 15 minutes and I just heard on the news that others areas of Blackburn suffered longer and shorter outages so it sounds like a cascade effect, a spokesman said at this stage they had no idea of what had cause the outage.

Neighbours alarms going off all over the place, and for some odd reason cars as well, work that one out!

Gave me an insight into life without electricity which I think is the subject of a new series on TV. What I find frustrating is going round resetting stuff that has lost it's memory the wife's alarm clock being a prime example. The trouble is all our stuff is more than 25 years old and the microwave is 27 years old and always loses the time settings. I suppose I could also put myself into the category of memory loss whether or not there is juice available. :-wow
 

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Topper said:
Gave me an insight into life without electricity which I think is the subject of a new series on TV.
As we become more dependent, it's scary thought..... especially as (if you can believe the press) we're being piloted towards power shortages by government toeing an EU line to shut down 'non compliant' power generation with no provision to cover the shortfall. I was about to say still by that time they'll have been chucked on the scapheap alongside the old power stations, But they won't, will they? They'll be sitting in some overpaid job; promoted to their own level of incompetence.
 

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We get lots of brief disconnections here (Used to be lengthy ones until various poles were renewed and auto-reclosers fitted on the local system) and apart from the truly annoying issue of resetting loads of clocks every outage, however brief, gives our ADSL Dynamic Line Management gear the opportunity to slash my Download Speed: It has taken five days to recover to 0.96 Mbps after a storm-induced 2 second outage last Friday.
 

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Channel Hopper said:
What a load of Jackson Pollocks, they really do love to over-hype such things, I'm surprised they didn't say that the chips will emit high energy x-rays that give you cancer, cos everything gives you cancer according to the daily fail... :-rofl2

Not to mention, they'd have to fit them with voltmeters and ammeters to read those states too, as the frequency is only relative to how fast or slow the grid's turbines are spinning (and is there to keep everything in-sync, one generator out of phase and boom goes the dynamite at that plant!!), and for an appliance to read such conditions to check whether the grid is about to collapse or not is just a complete farce... :rolleyes:

Back on the subject though, UPS units are really handy in places where the power is dodgy, they don't have to be big things, just small enough to keep things alive (like modems for example) so they don't lose settings... :)

Just don't buy ones with holes in the side and try to repair them like I did, cos they just tend to go bang.... :lol:
 

Topper

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Yes my 750W UPS is in the garage and soon to return indoors if this carries on, guess what ............it has gone down again for two minutes, wish they would get their act together.
 

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That might have been due to reconfiguring the local Distribution system in the wake of the original fault: If a fault is major and going to take a while, it's often possible to feed most of the affected customers with an alternative arrangement (Especially if there's a convenient loop in the area). At the end of the repair, the original arrangement will be re-instated.
 

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We always use alarm clocks with batteries because there will be a few days every year when the power goes off overnight.
 
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