Over the years I have been at Jasper County REMC, I have had opportunities to work out in the field even though my primary duties were at the office. When I started, an early version of a smart metering system was in place. This system became obsolete as we used telephone lines to get the meter reads from various collector sites to the office. When the next metering system was selected, I rode along with our metering technicians to deploy a powerline carrier advanced metering system. As the name indicates, this system injected a signal over the power lines to call the meters and received the responses in the same manner. Our latest smart metering system communicates over a wireless signal and has proved to be a very stable and robust system.
Over time, I realized that working at the different substations and checking meters across the county was also helping me learn our electric service territory. This gave me a great respect for our linemen, who find some of the most remote areas in the middle of the night during a snowstorm to restore power for our members.
Recently, I had the chance to ride along with our Line Foreman, Craig Smart, after a storm had passed over Jasper County. We had some scattered outages that needed to be assessed. The linemen are never sure what they might encounter, and the scenarios found on this night are just a small sample of what could be wrong.
The first outage was in the Asphaltum area with a primary wire touching the neutral that caused a short. This required a lineman to repair the primary wire and then to reset a device that detects faults on the line. On to Valley View subdivision, where a branch was on the line. The branch was cleared, and the fuse was replaced on the transformer. We proceeded to the Francesville area, where a wire had come loose that fed a fuse to an underground service. This wire was reattached, concluding our portion of the power restoration.
I hope you enjoyed an inside view of how I learned our electric service territory and some examples of how our linemen and operations department work together to restore outages.
