EME Power Systems Midweek Break

Wednesday 10 December, 2014

A national holiday park company recently re-assigned the HV maintenance regime for all of their UK sites to EME Power Systems.


A national holiday park company recently re-assigned the HV maintenance regime for all of their UK sites to EME Power Systems.

On one of the first sites that we attended we discovered a serious fault that was developing and it was nothing short of a miracle that the asset was still intact. If the situation had been allowed to develop further then there would have been a real chance that it could have caused serious injury, physical damage to its immediate environment and of course the serious inconvenience of a loss of supply - which had it occurred during the peak holiday season would have been a most undesirable event in itself.

Our works found two 11kv terminations serving the same high voltage ring main unit in a severely damaged / deteriorated state; we were amazed given the state of these terminations that the system had been capable of being energised and operating normally. To illustrate the severity of the fault please refer to the attached photographs.

Having notified the park manager of our findings the issue was immediately raised to the status of an urgent repair. Our skilled staff, conscious that there were over 100 residents with no supply called in emergency generation, 2 x455KVA generators were made available and arrived at 2020hrs, within 20minutes of their arrival on site the first substation was back on supply, the second following at 2330 hrs.

Our team returned the following day and ensured that a permanent repair was made.

EME Power Systems Project Manager, Steve Myson said "this incident is more proof of the urgency that should be attached to a ensuring that a proper maintenance system is in place and that an important aspect to consider when deciding who you should trust to carry out this type of work is the level of resources that the service provider has at their disposal; it should be remembered that we originally attended to carry out routine maintenance works only and it was only upon discovery of a serious issue that we had to escalate our works to a full scale reaction to a fault. EME Power Systems were able to draw on the engineers, jointers & fitters as well as all materials and emergency generation required to swiftly correct the issue and minimise disruption. There are many companies that offer to carry out HV maintenance works - I would always advise that searching questions are asked and that you should satisfy yourself fully that they would be able to respond in the way that we are able to when needed before trusting them with your HV servicing works."

We were thrilled to receive the following quote from the site maintenance manager a few days later:

"I would like to say a very big thank you to all the team that was involved with the repairs last week. You have a great team there with great communication at all times."

Mark - Site Maintenance Manager