An Early Summer Break - Out With The Old, In With The New

Friday 10th April, 2015

After our midweek break where we found two severely damaged 11KV terminations, we continued our HV maintenance regime for a national holiday park company and set off again, this time to the Isle of Wight.

After our midweek break where we found two severely damaged 11KV terminations, we continued our HV maintenance regime for a national holiday park company and set off again, this time to the Isle of Wight.

Here we discovered that the insulating oil in both of the transformers on site had started to breakdown which severely limits their performance and life span. In addition, the customer's HV switchgear was of the old long and Crawford GF type and we were able to quickly establish that it had been placed under a SOP. After notification of some recent catastrophic failures the customer decided they didn't want to chance any interruption to their supply. They decided the best course of action, to prevent any supply failure and to reintroduce normal switching operations to their equipment, was to have a controlled, planned shutdown with the minimum amount of downtime to swap their switchgear and rectify the transformer issues.

With the new switchgear ordered and the site due to fully reopen shortly it was all systems go to gear up for a return visit to carry out the works. Again we were able to rely on our trusted suppliers to organise both the switchgear and temporary generation in order to minimise any disruption, and all was delivered to the Isle of Wight under a planned and timed schedule (the two 500KVA generators must have taken most of the ferry up!). Being able to plan in this way, working and liaising with both the customer and the local DNO, enabled us to limit the downtime to less than one hour for each of the transfer of supplies at the start and finish of the works. The swapping of the two panel boards was carried out in an ideal transition with those who were still on the site virtually totally unaware that the works were taking place.

EME Power Systems' Contracting Engineer Kris Peplinski said:
"Again, this goes to show the level of service we can provide and the 'luxury' of being able to plan cannot be underestimated. The minimal disruption caused to carry out these works compared with an unexpected power loss is inestimable. Although we have shown we can respond at the drop of a hat in an emergency the difference in loss of power, time wise, would have been much, much greater and had it happened at a peak time would have caused great inconvenience for our customer. This really reiterates what our Project Manager Steve Myson has spoken about previously: firstly, the importance of ensuring that a proper maintenance system is in place and secondly, that who you should trust to carry out this type of work is a key aspect to consider as the level of resources that the service provider has at their disposal makes a vast difference."

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