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The Disruption Caused by Blackouts

In the last 6 months I have endured 2 blackouts at home (which is also my office). Yesterday’s was about 13 hours long, easily beating the previous record of almost 8 hours. The power supplier has given me the information on how to make a claim for the food in our freezer which has to be thrown out.

Now that I am working away from home for large parts of my day, I really need a working internet connection in the evenings so I can run the rest of my business. I can use my data card and laptop battery to work at reduced efficiency during the short outages, but anymore than 2 hours and it starts cause major disruption. The problem is that I use my laptop as a MP3 player while catching up on mail and feeds on the train, so my battery is almost dead when I get home.

Although I live a bit over 35kms from the CBD of the second largest city in Australia, there are times where I feel like I live out the back of nowhere. I have an electric train station 2 mins walk away, I have a “03 97XX XXXX” landline phone number and a 24 hour supermarket less than 5mins drive away. On the downside, couriers considering us country, so “next day delivery” means it will arrive 2 or 3 days after it is shipped. The other big reminder is the reliability of electricity supply.

In the last 3 and half years shortish blackouts (1 to 2 hours) have occurred on average once every 3 months or so. When I was living in Footscray (inner Western Melbourne), in almost 5 years, we had 2 outages I remember, both of them less than 2 hours, and one was from someone wrapping their car around a pole just down the road.

The compensation regulations (PDF) (p21) which apply to power companies in Victoria are completely inadequate and encourage poor maintenance. In the past our electricity retailer has claimed that they are not liable for any compensation claims where the outage is caused by matters outside their control, such as possums shorting out lines, cars hitting poles or various other natural causes. Inadequate staffing levels is something within their control.

Maybe the compensation claims from the local strip shopping centre traders will force the distributor to improve their response times, rather than being rude to customers who call for an ETA.

The following items have been added to the household shopping list:

  • Battery powered lantern
  • Battery powered radio

I just wish I could buy a more reliable power supply for a rental property (so solar panels on the roof is out).

Update Earlier this morning (31-May-2007), I had another 1 hour+ outage. This time the network didn’t come back up cleanly. A switch needed to be power cycled and a server decided to swap the network card assignments.