Power Outage Followup · 12:08am Jul 25th, 2022
I promised a second blog with more pictures, and this time you're not gonna have to wait a month or two to get it!
There'll even be a video which isn't exciting but it does have pretty flashing lights.
HERE's a link to the previous blog, in case you have no idea what's going on.
The power came back on sometime around midnight on Friday. I don't know exactly when, 'cause I was asleep. But in the morning there were lights in the house and the clocks were blinking.
Consumer's sent me a total of eleven e-mails regarding the outage. The first was shortly after midnight on Thursday.
This is more or less what they said:
We understand this power outage is an inconvenience and our crews are working to restore your power as quickly as possible. Our system estimates power will be restored to Casa Biscuit by 07/22/2022 03:00 AM. This estimate is based on information from similar outages in your area. It could change if crews arrive on scene and get more information. Visit our outage center to learn more.
Our records show your outage was caused by Other.
The current status of your outage is .
This is the most up-to-date information on your outage. We will contact you with updates if necessary.
They did contact me with updates (ten more times), pushing back the estimated power restoration times.
I assume that the messages are automated and send out whenever an outage report is filed; you will note that they say "It could change if crews arrive on scene and get more information."
This makes sense; after a big storm that caused power outages all over, they're not going to know if a breaker was tripped or a tree broke a telephone pole until they get there and see it for themselves.
Interestingly, they never changed the cause of the outage (you'd think that 'storm' or something similar would be an option), and the status only changed to 'crew assigned' after the tree truck arrived very late on Friday—when I got that e-mail, they were already working with chainsaws; I hope they were assigned and not just random tree trimmers who decided to do a good deed. [and this was long after the first trucks had opened and closed the BGB and installed the lunchbox generator]
Now we get to the photo essay part, yay!
right after the first volunteer firefighter arrived to block the road. You can't see his truck; the one with all the lights is the Ro-Ro truck.
The Big Green BoxTM is open (and it looks more grey than green, if I'm being honest). It's got some electrical stuff in the top and three car batteries in the bottom which I assume power it if the power is off. I have no idea what the BGB does. This was the first crew to respond.
You can see the stump of the pole in among the tree, and the cable that's down--that's television cable and internet, I never did see the electric wire that was down (it's possible that Consumer's had removed it already).
Here's the tree trimming truck at work. They didn't need to use the bucket 'cause all the tree was already on the ground.
I zoomed in (cell phone digital zoom, not the best quality) so you can see the lunchbox generator clearly, the coil of wire that the first crew installed, and the green light on the BGB.
I was also gonna give you the link to the story about the wrecked Envoy, but the site it's on isn't working at the moment. Maybe they had a power outage, too. Maybe my bad neighbor is to blame. 
Edit: issue resolved.
Experiment: Victoria and the Wrecked Truck
a problem I now have is because Ive been switched from POTS analog phone to VOIP style wall phone plugged into the internet Hub instead, is when the power goes down, so does the net Hub, because its not powered by the phone line. I thought from the numbres given in the analog days, the UK allowed up to REN 4, which was so much current into so much impedance, therefore a power rating, about 16 watts?
I think four or five years ago on the other side of the state, we had a similar thing happen. Except our power was out for four days and hundreds of trees fell all over the city. My family crowded around our gas fireplace (which thankfully didn’t cut out) and relied on board games, cards, and candlelight for the time. Was surprisingly fun and made our town look like a disaster location for several days.
It was one of the few times I think I pulled out a pencil and some paper lately.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if the lunchbox generator was there for the power tools.
Hey, Admiral, former cable field tech here. That Big Green Box™ you were referring to is actually part of the cable/fiber infrastructure, and has nothing to do with the service (240 VAC) power head.
We called them Power Supply Enclosures (with battery-powered Uninterrupted Power Supplies) or Power Conditioning Enclosures (without battery-powered UPS).
The TL;DR is that the supply steps-down and attenuates (conditions) power to all the cable line-side equipment on its Service Node, such as the Optical Distribution Node on the line to the right in the picture of the open PSE (the rectangular box with heat-sinks on it, inline with the suspended Overhead Trunk Cable).
Most cable equipment (ODNs, TalkBack Repeaters, Emergency Services Trunk Interrupts, monitoring equipment, fiber-to-coax repeaters, etc.) are actively powered — that is, they require a discreet, or dedicated, power supply independent of the utility mains — at a specific voltage. Older systems are/were 60 VAC, while fiber and duplex systems (talk-back systems that let your cable box communicate back to the Head End Station, such as Video On Demand or Cable Internet) require a 90 VAC feed. Even newer systems can now use a direct feed from the 120/240 VAC mains, which simplifies things, greatly.
The batteries inside provide power when — Eeeyup, you guessed it — the utility mains go out, mainly for E-911 to still operate (but, depending on the configuration, will usually also still power line diagnostic equipment and even the ODNs, so you still get some cable/internet features during an outage). Three batteries should provide 8–12 hours of backup (called “Standby” power, indicated by the red LED exterior status light), while six can go for 18–24 hours. If the mains are expected to be down more than the allotted standby time, then a portable generator can be plugged directly into the Power Service Insert (PSI) plug and provide a direct 120 VAC power supply.
So, that's the gist of it. I won't go into the nitty-gritty details, but here's a great page that lays out the CATV infrastructure and all of the hardware that brings your cable and Interwebs™ to life:
CityInfrastructure.com – Cable TV
Scroll down to Page 17 to learn more about the PSE
Incidentally, that enclosure looks like a PWE-3FT (Pole- or Wall-mount Enclosure – 3-battery – Front-mount Terminals) manufactured by Alpha Technologies, Inc. of Bellingham, Washington.
Alpha’s product description page is here, and the PWE/PME Series Technical Manual (PDF) is here.
Glad you got your power back.
Darn cute, fluffy birb-pones ...
5674943
Huh. So that's why we don't have any of them in my countryside subdivision. Our only wired broadband option is DSL via Bell Canada's last mile, they have a building just on the edge of the subdivision, and the lines are buried, not strung on the poles. (There's a classic phone service pillar box at the edge of our yard.)
I wonder what their plans are for the FTTH last mile that, for the last month or two, has existed as a bound-up coil of jacketed fiber poking out of the ground below our POTS termination box.
It's been over two months since storms wrecked everything from Michigan to the Dakotas, and I still have a duct tape-patched hole in my roof from where the tree branch fell. I guess the insurance company was swamped, since most of the delays was on their end, but the insurance payment came through and I'm just waiting to hear back from the contractor to set a date.
American power is strange.
From that Big Green Box to two out-of-phase power circuits to get full voltage... it’s odd.
Not meant in a condescending way, of course.
America being an early adopter of electricity, mistakes were made and lessons were learned.
The history of why and how America started using 120VAC is interesting. Something about Edison supplying a certain DC voltage, then Westinghouse using AC to get similar potentials which eventually became 120 volts. I’m foggy on the details, so don’t quote me, but the history and lessons learned along the way are interesting.
Other countries took note of these growing pains and 240 volts became the norm. Case in point, every house down my street has 3 phase 480v. Of course, no one has it perfect - not a single house down my street has town sewerage connections. We are still on lovely septic tanks.
A similar thing can be said for television.
America paved the way with NTSC.
When colour came about, NTSC tried to adapt and thus the backronyn “Not The Same Colour” was born, while other countries adopted PAL.
But this is the first I have heard of a “BGB - Big Green Box”.
You guys have made a pole mounted over-unity power converter or a flux capacitor relay, haven’t you?
EDIT: Never mind, I see someone else has given a good summary of that mystery box’s purpose.
5674943
The pole mounted flux capacitors will soon come, I’m sure.
Thanks for the blog posts. :)
(Offprint doesn't appear to be fully working for me at the moment, though, at least not enough to show me anything of or about the story.)
5675013
If you've not seen it already, you might find this interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4
5675234
Yeah that’s exactly it.
Two services of 120v, out of phase and added to make 240v.
i.stack.imgur.com/4aTpQ.png
But each service is still 120v and that is considered the norm, even on US military vessels.
By contrast, a three phase transformer feeds all the domestic power out my way, with each service being 240v.
oempanels.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/415V-Wiring-Diagram-3-Phase-4-Wire.png
Our area is semi-rural which explains the three phase service and lack of town sewerage. About half the homes have rainwater tanks too.
Realistically, the only appliance that uses three phase is the bore water pump.
The individual phases are treated as discrete services.
Of course, doing this means that the power is NOT balanced at all.
You would find this in the USA too, with the 120v / 120v system, because the split phases are used individually, the voltages are not balanced.
In fact, the power gets pretty crap sometimes.
I’ve measured voltages sag down to 205v on “normal nights”.
In a storm two months ago, one of the phases was lost for four
dayshours, just like Admiral Biscuit had in his home - only part of the house was powered.Isn’t electricity fun?
EDIT: Replaced the 480v diagram with a 415v star diagram. It’s easier to envisage.
5675246
"
"Isn’t electricity fun?
Hah, in its way, aye. :D
I'm surprised to hear you don't use the three phase service more, if that's the standard where you live, but I guess that's explained by it being the standard, it sounds like, particularly where you live, not in your whole country, with as a result there not being standard receptacles, appliances, etc. for it?
(Though it could be worse. I mean, Japan actually uses different frequencies in different parts of the country.)
5675246
Sooo, to balance the power consumption between the two 120 Volt phases, I should distribute my 15 and 20 Amp breakers in my main panel equally on both "hot busses" (sides) of the panel. I've never had a single phase failure here, Power is either on or off. Otherwise, if single phase failure was a predictable outcome, I could line up critical 15 or 20 Amp circuits on the hot bus (side) that doesn't fail during an outage.
5674876
A lot of people don't know that traditional phones were powered. I've even seen plans for getting power from a telephone connection--it's not much, but it's not nothing, either, and it's basically free if you're living someplace that provides a telephone but not electricity.
5674924
We get hit with pretty good storms a few times a year. You're close enough to Lake Michigan that there might be a dampening effect before the storms hit you (or they could make it worse, I dunno).
I have been down to oil lamp and pen and paper a time or two. Or a flashlight, but that's not as much fun.
As long as I keep my cell phones charged, I can have a bunch of modern conveniences for a long time even during a power outage.
5674926
It turns out that 5674926 has the answer--the lunchbox generator is there so things like E-911 keep working with the power out. Turns out that the BGB isn't Consumer's box at all, it belongs to the cable company.
5675421
From what I understand, the telcos got it passed in law very early on to make it illegal to gain, free, power from the phone line.
Even though you pay line rent, and installation, and call costs, etc.
5674943
I never would have guessed that it belonged to the internet company, although that makes a lot of sense.
Thank you!
The bucket truck in the driveway in the first picture (the one with the BGB open) is a cable truck. I saw it there and kind of chuckled, knowing that they couldn't fix their lines until Consumer's got the tree off the power line. Little did I know that they could fix some of the interwebs with their little lunchbox.
Also, it's fantastic when I learn new stuff on a blog post.
5674979
I've been lucky and not had any significant storm damage on my property. I lost a shed once, but that wasn't a valuable shed. And that might not have even been a storm; sometimes the cottonwoods just decide to drop limbs on things for funsies.
At least they finally came through for you. I've heard horror stories, although to be honest my insurance company has always been good to me for auto stuff.
5675013
That is a disadvantage to being a pioneer. And then inertia causing you to not want to change to something better when it comes along, as well. Granted, there's some expense involved, but it makes things better in the long run.
GM cars (and probably other brands) could come with cellular capability in them, and it wasn't that long ago that they informed people with early cars that their cellular capability wasn't going to work any more, since the cell companies weren't supporting whatever-G it was anymore (probably 2G). Disappointing if you were one of the customers who had a car like that and wanted to keep using its functionality, but for the rest of us, hanging onto 2G just so someone in an old Cadillac could use On-Star isn't a worthwhile tradeoff.
I don't fully understand how color TV in the US works (I've seen videos that explain it), but I am impressed that they got what they did in the wavelengths they had to use.
5675234
You're welcome!
Offprint is rarely fully working; they're making frequent updates to the backend, and it breaks stuff a lot. Which is kind of annoying, but what can you do?
5675258
I've had plenty of power outages and this is the first time I've seen only a single phase fail at my house--I don't think it's a common failure (and I don't think that you'd have much luck predicting which phase it might affect if it happens).
5675424
They probably did. They had a lot of power back in the day.
So did some other public utilities--in Michigan, Consumer's Energy (a power company) used to assign street addresses, rather than the Post Office.
As I recall, in most of the US you used to rent your telephone from them, rather than own it outright. I don't know when that changed.
5675422
If it’s a straight line wind storm, it’s actually worse as the lake doesn’t slow the wind down like foliage. They’re relatively rare and usually not that destructive, but every hundred or so years one comes along that levels towns. Usually the lake makes all of our weather milder temperature-wise.
5675434
:)
I think I do recall seeing something there saying it was still in alpha, aye. Well, I hope it shapes up well.
5675438
It was a long shot, like house insurance.
Haha, I’ve had a few notifications which I will try and resolve.
Also, I’m not trying to overrun Admiral Biscuit’s blog post, I hope it’s all fine.
5675249
Sorry, when a person has lived with something all their life, their description of that something to those foreign to it may not be the best.
Let me explain better.
cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/c66481d8a5c97a3a1f4802b7078cb84b
Typical power pole in Australia.
The top three high tension wires carry three phases of 33kV.
The lower four wires carry stepped-down 240v currents. The fourth wire is the neutral or return.
So there is three phase everywhere for distribution.
For consumption, it is just a matter of tapping off all of the lower wires instead of just one phase of 240v and the neutral.
I just happen to have all four because the local council has classed everyone on my side of the road as “semi-rural”, while everyone on the other side are “residential” and are given just one phase and the neutral.
I don’t live out bush, there is a McDonalds within walking distance. In short, the difference between the two sides is that the council has less obligations to those semi-rural (such as no sewerage connections), but the people living in that zone have different liberties. Example - my neighbours have chooks and geese in a backyard pen. Which is fine. Of course, they make all kinds of racket and the roosters crow before sunrise. But if anyone complained, the council would tell them to ignore it as they are semi-rural.
Still better than living under an HOA or in a gated community... darn those HOA horror stories.
Anyway, no, everyone has the standard receptacles.
encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTh9UFJ2ARwpb-GGo43Qx3fLN0jUmay_e-qDz6PeV0D4tbvxkxq_EU0TJgUZZE&usqp=CAc
On the right is the 240v socket we find everywhere - Live, Neutral, Earth pins.
On the left is the three phase socket. L1, L2, L3, Neutral, Earth. The water pump has that. Real motors are three phase, even refrigerators sold these days have three phase compressors - the fridge electronics convert single phase to three phase. Next time you go past a store that sells whitegoods, take a look at the stamp on the compressor.
And you’re right about Japan. They have different frequencies and different receptacles within their own country.
5675258
So you have two hot busses.
When people in the neighbourhood hang off one phase more than the other, the voltage sags unevenly. That’s really unavoidable when power is used unequally. Spreading out the load helps.
But doesn’t that require re-wiring of your main panel? I’d love to move everything off a phase (hot bus) that had failed, but that’s messy. Running extension cords across the floor from working sockets would be better.
5675433
The story of NTSC is interesting. And then PAL came about. I’ve actually forgotten why NTSC was forced to use 29.97 frames instead of 30 frames, but it was a clever steal of 0.03 frames of bandwidth in order to feed something else.
And finding a way to shove colour in a black and white broadcast, while still being useable by B&W telly’s was quite the achievement.
But yeah, early adopters. Pioneers. That’s life.
I didn’t know about GM cars with built in cellular capability that was deprecated.
Speaking of old GM cars... the GM EV1. You remember that? The electric car that had its power plug pulled?
5675530
Interesting! Thanks.
5675530
I agree that rewiring your breaker panel during a single phase power failure would be silly, with the possible exception being the 15 amp connection for the well water pump. An extension cord would be just fine in a pinch for the refrigerator. As for cooking (which requires both hot busses for the electric stove), I have a wood stove and fire wood on standby.
5675467
I remember one in the early 2000s that hit the Kalamazoo/Comstock area. Maybe you can still see some of the places along I94 where lots of trees went down.
My parents live in Holland, and they say that heavy snow usually falls inland of them, although IIRC how iced-over the lake is makes a difference.
5675513
We're all hoping for that
5675526
It's funny how insurance is generally something that you pay for but hope you never use.
5675530
No worries, there's nothing more fun than long discussions in the comments on my blog posts. We all learn stuff from those!
Some of my stories have been translated to Chinese, and one of the translators puts in footnotes for things that a Chinese reader might not know about. For example, in Window Washers, the translator explained what Home Depot was.
5676240
Good luck!
5675530
Not quite.
In the black-and-white beginning, NTSC was originally 30 frames/second (or 60 fields, since we're talking interlaced video here), with the vertical sync being tied to the 60Hz power-line frequency.
The change to 29.97 frames/second came when the backwards-compatible color system was added; in order to minimize intermodulation interference between the newly-added color signal ("chrominance") and the existing B&W ("luminance") signal and audio subcarriers, designers needed the color subcarrier to be an odd multiple (n + 0.5) of the horizontal scan rate, while the audio subcarrier would be an integer multiple.
Unfortunately, the original horizontal scan rate of 15,750Hz and audio-subcarrier of 4.5MHz wouldn't meet these requirements, mathematically. (4.5MHz / 15750Hz = 285.71, which is both an odd value and a non-integer one.) So, they either had to raise the audio-subcarrier frequency or lower the horizontal-scan frequency -- and since changing the audio-subcarrier's frequency would prevent existing B&W receivers from properly decoding the audio signal, they tweaked the horizontal-scan frequency instead. The horizontal-scan frequency became 4.5MHz / 286, or 15,734.266Hz -- and dividing that by 262.5 lines/field gives a field rate of 59.94 fields/sec, or 29.97 frames. Since the existing B&W receivers could easily tolerate this 0.1% variation in horizontal and vertical scan frequencies, the result was a backwards-compatible color broadcast signal that could be displayed by the rather large installed base of B&W sets already in place.
5675439
One big reason they didn't want you tapping the phone lines for power was that current consumption on the line was how the central exchange switches determined whether your phone was off the hook and in use or not. In the electromechanical-phone days, your phone was passively powered by the line itself; it had no internal power supply of its own; lifting the receiver from the hook closed the circuit and allowed the microphone and speaker elements to draw power from the line.
Also, the voltage was highly variable; while the open-circuit voltage would be around 48VDC when the phone was on the hook, it would drop to around 9V or so when the phone was in use -- and to ring your phone, the line would be pulsed with 90V AC, at a frequency of 20Hz, which would very likely do Bad Things to any low-voltage DC loads you were trying to power from the phone line without taking that into account.
5677866
Hey thanks for all of that !
Although I worked in television for about 8 years, that was starting in 2008 and every control room had made the transition to digital.
Analogue transmission was a poor forgotten cousin, that was tacked on and supplied due to government requirements for stragglers.
The most I learned about analogue was from old tech manuals printed in the 1980’s by the federal broadcaster. They were excellent. In typical, verbose government fashion, they went through everything from the cone colour receptors in human eyes, which led to why the colour green is dominant in colour broadcasts (4:2:2)... but it was
allmostly dying knowledge.It’s good to hear someone still remembers the old craft