I heard what sounded like a rifle shot this Saturday morning, and then all my power went out.
No wind. No storm. No branch down across a line. Just a sharp, flat crack from the pole outside my house, and then the particular silence of a home with no hum in it — no HVAC, no refrigerator compressor, no soft whir from the office down the hall. I've lived on the Kitsap Peninsula for nine years now, and this is the third transformer I've watched blow in that span. Three, on a property that isn't unusually large, isn't unusually loaded, and isn't served by some ancient spur line nobody's looked at since Eisenhower. Just an ordinary house that happens to sit under a piece of equipment that keeps failing.
The easy story — the one the utility will tell you if you call it in — is that this is weather. Old wiring, coastal damp, wind events, the occasional falling limb. And sure, sometimes that's exactly what it is, and there's not much to be done about a tree deciding to come down mid-gust. But a calm Saturday morning with clear skies doesn't fit that story. What blew today wasn't the weather's fault. Something inside that can finally gave out — insulation that had been quietly degrading for who knows how long, a connection that had been arcing in secret, a unit carrying more load than it was ever sized for. And nobody knew, because nobody was looking.
That's the part that should bother you more than the bang did.
Most pole-mounted transformers are dumb. No sensors, no telemetry, nothing reporting back to anyone. A utility typically finds out something's wrong in one of two ways: a scheduled visual inspection that might happen once every several years, or a customer calling in because their power just went out and their house sounded like a gun range for a second. That second method is, functionally, the maintenance plan. You are the sensor. Your blown modem is the diagnostic report.
And here's the thing — that's not because the alternative is impossible or even particularly expensive anymore. Retrofit monitoring points that track a transformer's temperature, load, and internal condition now run somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars per unit, no substation-grade infrastructure required. Utilities that have actually deployed this kind of monitoring at scale aren't finding it a wash — they're finding it saves money outright, because a proactive swap is a bucket-truck and an hour, while a reactive one after a bang like today's is an emergency dispatch, a longer outage, and often more damage to the hardware itself.
One Texas utility that built a proactive monitoring program using data it already had access to caught thousands of failing units before they failed and credited the program with saving millions of dollars and avoiding millions of minutes of customer outages. This isn't speculative technology. It's being done, today, by utilities that decided the juice was worth the squeeze.
So why isn't it standard? Because of whose ledger the costs land on. The utility's replacement cost is visible, budgeted, and rate-based — spending on infrastructure is literally how regulated utilities get compensated. What isn't on that ledger is my modem, my router, whatever's plugged into the wall in the office that didn't get the chance to shut down gracefully, the reset clocks, the food in a freezer if the outage runs long enough, the afternoon lost waiting for a crew. None of that is the utility's expense.
It's mine. It's yours. It's the neighbor's whose sump pump picked exactly the wrong week to need power. Add up nine years of that, times however many households sit downstream of aging equipment nobody's proactively checking, and the "cheaper to fix it when it breaks" math only works because most of the actual cost has been quietly handed to the customers standing under the pole.
Meanwhile the load on these systems keeps climbing. Every efficiency gain we get from newer appliances is getting eaten by more devices per household and, increasingly, an EV or two charging overnight on a transformer that was sized for a much smaller world. A unit that was marginal a decade ago may simply not be adequate now — and again, nobody's watching that shift happen in real time unless they've chosen to.
I don't think this is a mystery or a conspiracy. It's an incentive problem, plain and ordinary. The party that decides whether to monitor and replace proactively isn't the party that eats the cost of guessing wrong. Until that changes — through regulation, through customer pressure, through utilities deciding reliability data is worth collecting before the bang instead of after — a rifle shot on a calm Saturday morning is going to keep being the way I find out my transformer was tired.
Three for nine years now. I'd like a fourth to not happen.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment