[RFI] Power line RFI and Southern California Edison

[Donald Chester]

Sometimes it's best to try to by-pass the bureaucracy and get in touch directly with the linemen who actually do the work, or else the head honcho of the operation.

Years ago I had a severe line noise problem that wiped out all the HF bands, the AM BC band and even generated snow on the low band VHF TV  channels. Using  a portable shortwave radio, I traced down the problem to a pole about a quarter mile from my house. The arc was so bad that it was clearly visible from the road as soon as the sun went down. The problem was a "hot clamp", a loose connection between the main HV line and the branch that went down a secondary road. The people who lived nearby said their TV was totally wiped out, but they didn't suspect the power line to be causing the problem; they thought their TV was on the blink and they couldn't afford to take it in for repair.

I called the power company. When I reported the problem, I gave them the numbers that were tacked onto the pole, along with detailed directions to the exact location of the problem. A few days later, the problem still hadn't gone away, so I called them again. The person who took the call told me they had sent someone out and they couldn't find anything wrong. So they sent the crew out again, and once more, the problem didn't go away, and once again they told me they had re-checked the pole and couldn't find anything wrong. This went on for a couple of weeks.

Finally, one day I happened to get off early from work and came home in mid-afternoon. Just as I was pulling up to the house I saw the power company truck coming out of my driveway. I stopped him and asked if he was checking out a radio interference complaint. He said he was, but  couldn't find anything wrong. I told him that the problem was not here but a quarter mile away, and had him follow me, and I showed him the exact spot where the problem was. It took the crew about 20 minutes to fix the problem. As usual, the clamp on the hot wire had worked loose, a frequent failure with the mechanical clamps they use on aluminium wire.

I asked the guy why they had come to my house instead of following the directions I had given over the phone to find the pole in question with the specific numbers on the pole. He said that the repair crew never gets that kind of information when a problem is reported. The people in the central office submitted a work order listing the generic nature of problem - radio interference, and the customer's address. Nothing more; they just trash any further details submitted by the complainant. The only information the crew received was my home address and the nature of the problem, so they assumed the problem was at the pole serving my house. He told me the best way to quickly solve the problem next time would be to wait until after office hours and call the emergency outage number, where the person answering the phone would be a member of the actual repair crew working the night shift.

I tried that a couple of times when subsequent problems occurred, and it worked each time. Once I called about 2 AM and after talking to the guy, explained that it wasn't a real emergency since I was about to go to bed and that if they couldn't get to it until the next day that would be OK. He told me that indeed this WAS an emergency as far as they were concerned, because those "hot clamps" can sometimes burn the main wire in two and then they have the danger of a live wire on the ground where someone could accidentally come in contact with it, so they would get out to fix it post haste.

The last incident I had was a couple of years ago. By then they had converted to an automated outage reporting system, in which I had to call an out-of-state 800 number and couldn't talk to a real live human. I went through the voice menu and reported the problem to their voice mail, but the next day called the central office and asked to speak to the main supervisor and explained the situation. He said they would get someone out "in a few days", but the problem was gone by that evening and so far has not recurred.

Don k4kyv