Residents should get into the habit of maintaining their electrical system, including its wiring, regularly, say Tangedco officials.
These officials offered this advice following the recent fire accident at an apartment complex in South Perumal Street in Vadapalani, which claimed a few lives. The fire had been caused by a short circuit in a junction box.
Tangedco officials said that at present, the State electricity agency does not have any mechanism whereby it could send its workers to carry out routine checks for faults in electrical systems at residential buildings.
“Such maintenance has to be undertaken by owners of individual houses, multi-storey apartments and gated communities to prevent short-circuits,” says a Tangedco official.
On its part, Tangedco is replacing the traditional double-pole transformers with single-pole transformers to prevent frequent power fluctuations.
The advantage of having a single-pole transformer is that it occupies lesser space and it can be installed for a small number of houses, say 100 consumers in a street, with a capacity of 100KV.
“Single-pole transformers address the problem of power cuts in a specific street without disrupting power supply in the neighbouring streets. Such transformers are gaining in popularity in smaller towns like Vijayawada, Nellore and Ongole in Andhra Pradesh,” says a Tangedco official.
Tangedco expects its consumers to be judicious in the use of electrical appliances, especially air-conditioners. It discourages the use of ACs along with multiple boosters as this is one of the main causes of power outage. Tangedco officials also point out how a single house has ACs installed in more than one room.
“Until a decade ago, the rush hour in terms of high electricity consumption was between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m . Now, the rush hour of electricity consumption is between 10 p.m. and 11 a.m. when most of the houses switch on their air-conditioners, which results in considerable power fluctuations.
In other words, the power consumption during this period increases, on an average, to 450 ampere now compared to the situation a decade ago when the consumption of power during the same period was only 200 ampere. This rise is mainly due to use of air-conditioners with multiple boosters. We get most of the calls relating to burst of transformers around 10.30 p.m. every day,” says a Tangedco official.
