Power Cut And 3 Days Of Total Blackout

Tamil Nadu Electricity Board. TNEB for short. This is our power supplier.

Heavy rains always plays havoc with the power supply to our flats. Only our cable leading to our flats gets burnt or short circuits and power goes phut.
When the power went off, everyone thought the other will complain to the EB. I did complain over the phone several times before leaving for and after returning back from work. The second day, all the guys came out voluntarily not being able to cope without electricity!
Then it was chasing these guys on the phone and in person and requesting them to rectify the fault. But they were busy attending to urgent calls from everywhere. When it rains these men make money. There's no making hay while the sun shines :)

Since it's cable burning fault and not a fuse off call in our case, the men take longer to come.
The EB men dig a trench across the road leading to the junction box, patch up the joint yet again with liquid tar and fill the trench. This was a temporary solution to our eternal problem of getting TV sets, washing machines, ACs and heaters repaired on and off. The lights too flickered often whenever we used to switch on the water pumping motor. There had to be a permanant solution for this.

Today I was home when the men arrived after 2 days of constant follow ups.
I asked them how we could solve it. They said we have to replace our burnt cable with a new better gauge one. Even though it is actually the responsibility of the EB department to provide/replace burnt cables, they often escape by saying that there's no stock of new cable with the office. For 4 years we suffered because we were reluctant to buy them the new cable. We all may have spent double the amount in repairing or replacing our gadgets over a period of time.

This time we could not suffer anymore and we all took a decision to cough up money to put this eternal problem to an end.
Quickly we made calculations for the items and the labor for the 3 men.
It came to about Rs.9000/- total for the entire work.

40 meters of 35 guage cable wire, an insulation tape, 80 feet of 2" 6mm guage pvc pipes to encase the cable for protection against further external damage like rainwater, etc. and the men's labor charges was all that was required to solve our power cut problem.

3 days of no TV, no lights, no water in the pipe taught us to value these things which we take for granted. For me no internet and checking of mails and blogging too.

Today I feel happy to get connected again. The lights shine brighter with no flickering though we are all poorer by about Rs.9000/-. But we lose some to gain some.

Cheers!

Mahalakshmi.