A Page for Electricity Nerds

If you are looking for interesting/exciting things, read no more, go get high on a cup of tea.


Today 'they' decided that the cable they excavated yesterday is not the right cable.
Or the other two they found that they knew not what about.
So they were instructed to dig a trench 5.5meters up Blagdon Terrace.

I should explain here the topography of old mining villages.
They consisted of pairs of terraced buildings with fronts facing each other and a path inbetween.
Behind were back lanes that had no names where coal was delivered and tradesmen visited.

So here they are digging a trench between the Blagdon Terraces, there is no Blagdon Road!

In fact the end of the cable they were after was just 3.5 meters up the path.
It is just at the brown gate where the two thin cables are, that supply electricity to individual dwellings.


At our house end of the trench, going from left to right, the cables are:
the orange duct contains a redundant council street light cable,
the next thick dark cable is the new three phase supply to near our house.
The next right is a thin dark cable which is the single phase supply to our house.
The last right is a duct carrying the new street lighting cable.
Why are you reading this far? It is uphill work for me.


Here the cable joiner has connected our new house cable to one of the three phases
and is making the Neutral/Earth conductors to connect to the supply neutral/earth.


A green encapsulated cable is connected to the nuetral/earth.

Finally the whole is encapsulated in a plastic container that is filled with epoxy resin and buried.


The conductor in the green cable is connected to an earth rod which is pushed down.
They are not allowed to hammer earth rods down now in case they hit other gas/water/electricity/cable services.


At the upper end the live cable is exposed and the old yellow phase has a section bared,
the new EU cable colour black is bared ...


... and the two are clamped together by a joiner wearing rubber gloves inside other gloves.
The whole is LIVE! at 240volts.


Inside the house we have an electricity supply. There is just a cable and a fuse socket, no fuse yet.
But a meter and consumer distribution unit will soon follow.


Later on, another two crew arrived in a small! lorry to clear the lane of debri.

I was most impressed with this operation:
first came a high vis, hard hat person sussing out the ground using their out-of-date records.
Next came a digger team with wagon, trailer and mini-digger who diamond-cut the tarmac,
and dug a trench up to where the had been told the mains cable was.
They found a cable but joint team said no go, dig 5.5m further back to find the real cable.
Next day the diggers hand dug back and found the real active cable.
The diggers pushed the new cable through the ductwork, it was hard work, he was drenched in sweat, on a cold day.

What is more impressive is that the whole operation involved five/six crews,
totalling ten people and nine vehicles, in six phases,
each crew and material supply has to be on time for each phase.
How did they cope without mobile phones?

Do not expect much blog for a few days, it is the May Bank-Holiday weekend.
I shall be tidying up, cleaning, storing, keeping the building site workable/safe.

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