A very sorry looking charred cable, no longer connected!

Yesterday at around 6:30 BST the lights dimmed and fans started going off and on. Oh no another brown out like we had this morning I thought, but no, suddenly everything went off. A full on power cut.

The power company had to isolate the mains due to a cable fault, which manifested itself with clouds of smoke billowing up Tomswood Hill.

Whilst we battled to get dinner cooked on the gas hob with no access to the oven, microwave or kettle, the engineers dug up the road, revealed a pretty sorry looking cable and proceeded to strip back the ‘feed side’ ready for splicing. They were going to prep one side of the cable, restore power to the rest of the street and splice the repair to the remaining two houses ‘down line’ while the circuit was live!

I can’t say how impressed I was watching the guys recovering the service from what appeared to be a total mess.

Whilst chatting, they explained how you will never get a long term power cut as the electricity company would get fined a huge amount if the outage exceeded 12 hours!

I pointed out that if you had an electric car and were unable to charge it for 12 hours, you probably would not be going to work the next day as your car would not have enough time to charge!

Jokingly I asked, well how is the grid going to cope when we are all driving electric cars? It probably wont he jokingly replied in typically fruitier language than I can print here.

Well I hope he was joking!

GB7CH was fully back up and on-air within minutes of the power being restored at 10:09 BST.

Hi,

Despite having a ‘Business Broadband’ service, it appears that nothing is sacrosanct and we have endured a few service outages of late.

When the service goes down out of hours, I am afraid that there is nothing much that can be done at the moment, and the trunk service to the Brandmeister Network is unavailable. During the day however the service is switched manually to a backup service and the trunk to Brandmeister is maintained, but sadly the Dashboard access from the website will not be available.

At the moment everything is switched back and running properly.

Thanks for your understanding, and bear in mind your expectations from this service which is provided entirely at my own expense.