Washington Light and Power making a reliable system.
Washington Light and Power had the opportunity to make our system a more reliable system. In doing this, we rented a piece of equipment from Brownstown Electric Supply. It is called the Exactor outage avoidance system. It is a complicated piece of equipment that has GPS, a cellular connection and a high frequency listening device built into one box. The device sits next to a driver in a vehicle and the driver follows our circuits from the substations to the ends of the lines. While doing this the Exactor is listening for a high frequency noise, that electrical equipment gives off when failing, and records the location of the problem. At the end of the day the driver downloads the files, through a cellular connection, to Exactor INC. and they send us a report once a week on the problems the machine has found.
Kent Bunch was given the opportunity to use the Exactor for the month and so far the Exactor has found 790 possible problems, with 40 of those being critical and in need of immediate repair. He has driven each circuit out at least 4 times. With 8 circuits, his mileage is up around 800 miles or so. After expecting some of the critical problems reported, like the one shown, this insulator is breaking down and letting electricity through. It very well could have caused major problem and knocked out power for hundreds of people and finding the problem would have been like finding a needle in a haystack. This equipment finds problems in minutes, when something like this could have taken hours in the night to find. Locating problems like these could also help reduce overtime and most of all help us keep the power on for you!
Another problem area this winter has been on Viola Avenue. Every time it would rain or the wind would blow it would knock out the fuse and cause headaches for everyone!!! Upon checking pole after pole after pole, we couldn’t find the problem. So we decided to get rid of the old wire and start over. We ran a new primary and neutral wire and took down the old. In the process we found some spots on the old wire that couldn’t be seen from the ground. See picture. With the new wire, there has not be a problem so far.
These are some of the updates we are doing at our utility. We are working everyday on updating our system so we can continue to be an efficient, reliable utility for our community! We can’t help it but, some of these updates require outages and we our sorry for any inconvenience it may cause!!
Thank you for your understanding!
Washington Light and Power