Electricity is such an important component to everyday life that some people cannot image what they would do without it. It’s safe to say there are many generations alive right now that have never experienced life without electricity. There are many small situations that could give people a taste of what it’s like, however. During severe storms, hurricanes, and even earthquakes it’s common for the electricity to go out, leaving homes without it for hours, and in some situations for days. During this downtime is when most people realize what they’ve taken for granted, access to the internet, TV, and air conditioning. Unfortunately, if you’re not prepared for this type of situation, you could run into a lot of issues.
If having electricity at all times is deeply important to your lifestyle, then there are some practices to prevent a severe impact due to an outage. Although it is not possible to entirely prevent some outages, it is possible to ease and reduce them. Electrician services are becoming more and more knowledgeable on how to keep grids up and healthy. There are almost 600,000 electricians doing their work in the United States, which means you should be well protected from any potential outage.
1. Cleaning
Keeping lines, equipment, and machinery clean and cared for is key for electrical work. More often than not, random power outages are due to dirty or old equipment. Caked on dust, dirt, or other debris can prevent equipment from functioning correctly, resulting in shoddy connection to homes.
2. Emergency Maintenance
Electricians commonly handle issues with transformers as well. Transformers can blow up and malfunction due to high voltage, and this can occur two ways. High demand in electricity can cause the temperature to rise in a transformer quickly, causing the equipment to burn and eventually explode. Another way is when a storm occurs with large amounts of lightning. If a strike is too close to a transformer, it will also cause a large amount of voltage, resulting in an explosion. If a transformer blows up in these two ways, electricity will no longer get to the surrounding area. This results in emergency repairs from electrician services. These repairs are relatively quick and can get power back up within hours. Other random events can occur to knock out power as well, such as car accidents where poles are hit and need to be repaired by electrician services.
3. Weather Impact
Weather can be a big issue for some electrical equipment. Flooding during storms can cause damage to on ground equipment. To prevent severe damage, these machines may be turned off by electrician services and result in discontinued service until flooding goes down. Wind, along with flying debris, can knock out power lines and poles, causing severe damage. If lines and other equipment are damaged, it can take days to repair. Ice is also a common nuisance to electricity in colder climates. An abundance of ice settling on lines can weigh them down, and cause them to break. Electrician services have their hands full with caring for equipment during severe weather events.