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APRIL FOOLS DAY
POWER SURGE DAMAGES VILLAGERS' EQUIPMENT
In the late afternoon of April 1st a number of power
surges affected some parts of the village. This caused damage to a number
of village computers in particular (to us) the main machine that we use to
edit this web site! Our computer has a failed motherboard which will
require replacement so we have put in a claim with EDF Energy.
Should you have found any damaged equipment in your
home (on this occasion it seems that only small appliances suffered) then
we would ask that you too claim as soon as possible as the more people who
claim the easier it will be for EDF's insurers to verify the incident.
Please note that to be damaged your equipment may
have just been on standby but it must have been connected to the mains
supply at the time of the incident.
The telephone number for the EDF Energy Customer
Service team is 0800 028 4587 - Option 4.
Remember that whoever you pay for your electricity
you are still ENTITLED to make a claim from
the people who "own the wires" - that's EDF Energy. If you do make a claim
it will help other villagers who find themselves in the same position.
Off we go again!
16th July 2009 - Not sure if we have missed some cuts but
there was a two hour break last Thursday night. This time it was the
North/Eastern half of the village affected. Seems the new cables didn't do
much good!
9th. March 2008 - The last couple of months have been quite
quiet on the power cut front but your webmaster is typing this note in the
dark as we are again without electricity. This time the outage is said to be
due to another "High Voltage Fault" but when we ring up to check progress
the automated system says that a Post Code almost 100 miles away is
affected! So we don't know if E.D.F. are even aware of our local problem.
How are we putting these notes onto the internet? We have given
up on mains power and bought some emergency back up batteries!
Update It's now
just after 3a.m. and the lights are back on, but how this was achieved has a
lesson for all villagers. As sometimes happens the power came back on in
Haywards Heath and Lindfield (we could see the glow of street lights on the
horizon) but we were still in the dark.
E.D.F. Energy don't monitor things that closely and
they wait until someone rings up to tell them if their home is still in the
dark. Unfortunately many villagers think that someone else will have rung
in, or perhaps they don't want to make a fuss, and our lights stay out.
It wasn't until I rang E.D.F. just after 2a.m. that they despatched a
crew to the "West Hill" transformer (wherever that is) and power was
restored. By the way, if you are the first to ring in, or they think that
the problem is that your home trip has gone, E.D.F. will threaten to charge
you a call out fee if the fault isn't on their equipment - hardly good
customer relations! So if you have a power cut
please don't leave it to everyone else - ring up E.D.F.! Their emergency
number is 0800 783 8866 - it is pre programmed into our 'phone!
Spoke (typed) too soon!
At 06.50 this morning (10th March 2008) the power went off - again! Yes
there is an intense storm in the area but surely in 2008 there are ways to
reliably transfer power when it is raining? We at HorstedKeynes.Com were off
for a little under 7 hours and power has just been restored. However given
that it is very windy outside...... ;-) |