Power Bump
My dad is an Electrical Engineer who has worked really hard to become the industry’s leading expert on High Voltage Protection at power substations and cell sites.
What does that mean? You would think I would know - he talks about it all the time. I unfortunately have learned how to drown it out and think about things like… boys… dogs… wine…
However, when we had our power bump on Tuesday which effected homes from Davis County down to Salt Lake County, I immediately thought of him.
The news was fairly vague… a fire caused it. “How did it start on fire?” I thought. Never fear! My dad has the answer:
It wasn’t a ‘power bump.’ It was probably a transformer internal fault (direct short from the high voltage lines to the inside of a step down transfer) at a substation on Redwood road that didn’t trip out their protection relays before something blew up!
The transformers are full of oil. Internal shorts inside these transformers create massive magnetic pressures capable of splitting them wide open. When they split you get a very large explosion that sets the oil on fire. Not a pretty site. It could cost them around $500,000 to replace the transformer.
Geeky, I know. But that’s one of the many reasons why I love him.
