Sunshine, Showers.... and Power Cuts

Winter is upon us, and the wind has settled for much of the time in the southwest to northwest quadrant, bringing sunny intervals and heavy showers which often have hail and lightning in them.  So we're very much into the power cut period of the year.  Last night we had the first, which followed on a lightning strike.  It lasted from about 5.00pm until 8.15pm.

The outage was only unexpected because, as far as we know, we're currently running on generators.  There are some at Caim, to the east of Kilchoan, these ones (above) at Branault, more beside the forestry by Loch Mudle, and some at Sanna.  They're supplied by Aggreko, a Scottish company which is doing extremely well through its dominance of the market in supplying, at very short notice and anywhere in the world, things like generators.  Their website is here.

Having had over 100 hours of power cuts in the December and January of last winter, we rang the Scottish Hydro emergency line (0800 300 999) immediately.  As usual, we were answered quickly, and were informed that they already knew of the fault, and that it was widespread.  Half an hour later, the young man rang back to say that the fault had only affected our generators, and that the engineers were on their way from Fort William and would be on site by 8.00pm.  If the power was going to come back, it would be shortly after that - otherwise it would probably be off for along time.

Today, the same young man rang back to apologise for the outage.  All the engineers had had to do was throw a switch.  When we asked why we were on generators, he said he thought it was because a major upgrade was going to happen, but he wasn't sure.  However, he promised he would find out and get back to us early next week.