Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

The Oregon Historic District is a neighborhood in Dayton, OH, which includes one of the earliest surviving combinations of commercial and residential architecture in the city. Unfortunately, last week the district was in the news for other reasons. On July 14, power went out in the Oregon District and was not fully restored until the next night. This outage affected not only the residents but all of the small businesses located in the area.

One business owner mentioned that “DP&L was out front and they said with the storms, electricity runs underground in the Oregon District. It’s very old. With the storms, it flooded up to the electrical lines.” DP&L is the Dayton Power and Lighting Company.

When asked about the power outage, DP&L responded that “The cause was an issue with an underground cable, attributed to lightning.” Even after the issue was located, throughout the night power was constantly going on and off. The reason was that DP&L was troubleshooting the line to determine and isolate the problem in order to replace the correct cables.

Under these types of conditions, most electric companies lower the amount of power being supplied to their customers in the hopes of preventing brownouts and the always-damaging blackouts. Over-usage can also cause transformers to work overtime to the point of exploding, causing fires and outages.

Being without power for more than 24 hours can cause a lot of small eateries to lose not only money, but also their entire stock of refrigerated items. In addition to a staff that cannot work, all of these items need to be replaced and in most cases the equipment housing them needs to be cleaned and sometimes replaced.

Most equipment, whether it’s a refrigerator, computer or stereo equipment, is not designed to be turned on and off several times an hour. As power companies try to isolate and fix problems within a hundred-channel cable system, power often comes on for a few minutes before going out again, only to have the process repeated hundreds of times.

In some cases, certain equipment needs to be shut down through the proper procedure, which could require several minutes and various pieces of equipment. It’s times like these that having a good backup option is critical. Strategically placed uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs) could save equipment.

It would seem like a no-brainer that having good power backup options, whether it is a UPS for smaller equipment or a gasoline powered generator for refrigerators, is something that should always be considered, especially as the type of weather conditions that knock out power continue to strike all over the world.