Electrical installation in an outbuilding

[Nick]

Ancient paper insulated cable is actually very reliable unless it's been physically damaged. I've seen jointers working on stuff that's well over 50 years old and inside it looks as good as new.

When the Utility Emergency Response Team came - 2 hours after the fire brigade had called them - a team of navvies had dug down to the cable outside the house. It was raining. The hole was filling up with water. The cable was still on fire in the garage about 5 metres away...

The guy from the utility company just got into the hole with big wellies on and rubber gloves, and using a huge pair of ceramic-bladed shears, he cut the cable...

That stopped the source of the fire - the fire brigade then went in and extinguished the rest...

The guy in the hole then proceeded to splice new tail onto the cut cable whilst it was still live and in the rain - I was rather concerned about this but he said it was normal - one of the navvies kindly held a brolly over him whilst some of this was going on

He said that the 240VAC stuff is OK when its live and you know what you are doing, it's the 11KV and higher where it gets interesting... and it was simpler and quicker to do it live rather than have to mess with the substation...

They filled the splice with resin with a sand filler, and that was that... he did say that the main feed from the substation was fine...

I do use APC UPSs on critical infrastructure as the nominal mains can go up to 255VAC and stay there for long periods - it also drops to 220VAC and sometimes is all over the place... we get a fair few brown-outs, especially in the winter (sometimes 10+ a day), and the occasional black-out.

The joys of being out in the country...