Blog posts tagged with 'Emergency Power in UK'

Almost every home in the country has electrical power, and most of the time we don’t even think about it and how it works. When we need light, we press a switch. When we need to cook, we press another one and turn some more on the cooker as required. That’s it. Simple.

However, in outlying areas the electricity supply can be intermittent on occasion, and although we don’t think much about it, if at all, power outages can happen anywhere at any time for any number of reasons.

Some of us are old enough to remember the 3-day week in 1973/1974 when the miners were on strike at the same time as there were oil shortages. There was insufficient fuel to run the power stations and Prime Minister Edward Heath announced that the lights would go out at certain times of day, and we can remember refusing to be crushed by the miners while we were decorating and continued to paint the lounge walls by candlelight in the evening.

The Christmas No 1 in 1973 was “Merry Christmas Everybody” by Slade, which was ironic, but we buckled down and got on with it. Comedian Bruce Forsyth said on TV “It could come to this”. He struck a match and announced: “Match of the Day!”.

Well, we survived all that, but there is still the possibility of power outages today, nearly 50 years later. This can cause problems ranging from inconvenience because the TV is not on and we can’t watch Corrie or East Enders, to serious issues where power is needed continuously such as in hospitals, for example.

This is why many people invest in stand-by generators so that if the power goes down the lights don’t go out – well only for a few seconds at most.

At Blades Power Generation we provide the best emergency power source in the UK with our range of generators which can be operated either manually or with the use of an Automatic Transfer Switch, or ATS.

When you use a manual switch, it obviously means that you need to be on the premises when the power goes down in order to switch over to the generator.

Using an ATS is the answer if you need to keep the power on even when you are away from your home or business, because it will automatically switch on the generator, which is the best emergency power source in the UK, and the lights are on again as soon as it is up and running, in a matter of seconds.

Not everyone will remember the Great Storm of October 15th/16th 1987, but this writer remembers it only too well. At the time I had a flourishing business that operated nationally and managed to achieve what is many people’s dream – the big house in the country.

I lived in a small village (pop. 2,000) in Kent in a large Victorian house built in 1882 surrounded by fields and woodland. In the summer the fields were full of young bullocks and in the winter full of sheep. I remember the Great Storm vividly because trees were felled all over the village and we couldn’t get out to drive to work. My wife and son were away in our seaside apartment.

The bad news was that all our power went down. There were not enough electricians to carry out all the repairs, so after three or four days, many were shipped over from Northern Ireland to help out. The freezer was full of food, but that all had to be thrown away very quickly. But never mind, we were promised that power would be restored soon.

Gradually, homes from the outside of the village on my road running into the village centre got power back on. So did homes running from the village centre down towards mine. But there were about ten of us still with no power.

And so it was for thirteen days! The nights were drawing in and we were sitting in the dark. No TV. No washing machine. No electric cooker (fortunately we had an Aga as well).

If I had only known about – or even thought about – getting an emergency power source in the UK. But it never occurred to me. Certainly, we did get occasional power outages from time to time, but only for a few hours, so nothing too serious. But thirteen days!

It turned out that the electricians working from the village centre towards the other lot working from outside the village had somehow between them missed out our ten houses in the middle!

Speaking from experience, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to be without an emergency power source in the UK. At Blades Power Generation you can find a generator that will kick in automatically when your power goes down, and there are also other models that need to be started manually. But don’t find yourself stuck out in the sticks with no power for nearly two weeks!