This past weekend I decided to finish installing some Uninterruptible Power Supply units at my transmitter site. During the course of this installation I looked up at the incoming power feed to the building and discovered some extremely serious deterioration of the wiring. The copper was exposed, discolored and corroded for about 6″ where the wires came into the weather hood. Yikes! It looked like a splice that had failed and got pretty warm.
I had noticed some deterioration before but I did not remember it being nearly this bad. I certainly did not remember the bare wiring…It had been deteriorating over time and finally reached a point where I decided it needed to get fixed very soon. I finished the installation of the UPS units and went back home. It bugged me for the rest of the holiday weekend.
On Tuesday morning after the holiday I decided to get it fixed NOW considering the potential downtime it would cause if it failed on its own. I called the power company and reported the condition. They said they could have a lineman there that afternoon but that we needed to have an electrician there to replace the failed wiring on our end as well.
I generally would work through the “proper” channels of the college to get this done but this just couldn’t wait. Better to ask forgiveness than permission in some cases. I called a local electrician and lo and behold they actually had someone available to do the work that very afternoon! This is no small feat! It is next to impossible to get people like this on site at the same time on short notice, let alone to have them do it the same day!
I agreed to meet the electricians and the power company at the site at 3 PM. I sent an E-Mail to the staff explaining what was going on and that I would try to keep the station on at low power with a UPS during the outage. Generally we do not like to take stations down (or put them on low power) during the day but this was an extremely urgent maintenance issue.
The electrician was at the site a bit before 3 and the power company was there around 3:15. As an added bonus, the campus plumbers came to take a look at what it was going to take to finish the fuel piping for my new generator! The generator wasn’t ready for service yet so I had to rely on the newly installed UPS units to keep the equipment powered up.
Vehicles left to right: Electrician, me, power company
The plumbers are there somewhere too…
I shut the disconnect off just before the power company lineman pulled the fuses at the transformers. Before I did that, however, I took a few moments to properly shut down everything in the shack and put the aux transmitter on the air at low power. It was DARK in the shack with all of the lights out! Only the glow from the audio processor’s LCD screen and the light streaming through the open door allowed me to see what I was doing.
Equipment humming along in darkness
Old UPS, new UPS, HD audio processor and aux transmitter
The UPS battery lasted for a good 45 minutes with the aux transmitter running at 100 watts. We did go off the air briefly just as the crews were finishing their work but altogether it was a successful repair.
Ah, the joys of Broadcast Engineering!
No user commented in " Power problems on Pilot (AKA Lights Out!) "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a