Being a Lineman - Episode 29
VloĆŸit
- Äas pĆidĂĄn 4. 11. 2022
- Hey Everyone!
After a long month, I'm almost caught up on my work orders :P.... only 25 to go!
This episode didn't quite go as planned. I was hoping on capturing a lot more action, but as mentioned, this is 100% real and often times how the day goes!
Be safe out there everyone! đđ»
***
Keep in mind my videos are to be used as guidelines only!
There are many different ways to preform the tasks shown in this videos.
Always adhere to your own company's policies and procedures.
This work should only be preformed only by those whom are both trained and authorized to do so! ***
Huge thanks to my Patreons! đđ
⥠/ bobsdecline
audio courtesy of:
Corncob Country by Kevin Macleod
CZcams audio
#bobsdeclineââ #beingalineman #lineman
738 741, remember this number...
Me, five minutes later; 730 741 right!? đđ€Šââïžđ€Šââïžđ€Šââïž Lol
âYou donât know the power of the Dud Call⊠I MUST waste your time!â - Darth Dispatcher.
đ€Łđ€Ł
I am in Southeastern New York. I had a very large maple tree on my property in front of my house. When the tree died my local power company (Con Edison) had the tree removed even though it was on my property. They paid for the entire tree removal project, supplied the contractor and everything. Since the poles and wires are on my side of the road, had that huge tree fallen across the wires it probably would have taken everything down and maybe even snapped the pole. If it fell in the other direction it would have taken out my house. So it worked out for the better. Plus saved me a couple thousand in tree removal costs.
I hope your employer realizes just how much of an asset to the industry you are. I am just a regular person, and while I knew this was a tough job, your videos have made me appreciate just how intense this career is.
Appreciate the comment very much Paul! đđ€
Don't be ridiculous. We live in a capitalist economy. Workers are considered worthless - all money goes to the CEOs.
Although power companies are sometimes government run so they might pay okay.
@@thewhitefalcon8539let me guess. Your views skew to the left end of the political spectrum? Why donât you spend a year in Cuba or North Korea and then decide if thatâs still something you support?
â@@Renville80 what the f**k are you talking about my dude? do you have brain damage? do I need to call an ambulance?
I am on the absolute opposite end of electricity, designing silicon chips that make modern devices "smart". We spend most of our time at under one Volt DC. Love your vids, it's super cool to see how things work out there. Keep it up!
Under 1v and tons of current....
Working with FPGA and CPUs is a science in itself. Lol
Was with TI in the 90's doing GaAs MMICs (microwave monolithic ICs), like the devices used in Ku band DBS satellite home terminal LNBs and the 'front end' of microwave test equipment made by Agilent/Keysight and such too ...
I love those "no fault found" calls
Bogus calls happen so often in lots of industries. It can be aggrivating for sure but part of the job. You're a good dude! You seem super genuine and humble too!
I am an electrical contractor. I had a few calls like that one. I call them ghost Jobs.
At least you get to enjoy some nice scenery as long as you like trees. I think it's pretty. Thank you for sharing this video. I appreciate everything all of you linemen do. Stay safe and God bless.
Love the scenery out there! Meant to stop and take a shot of the view on the mountain for the video đ€Šââïž. Appreciate you always stopping by and commenting! đ€
is there a TV broadcast tower in that area? At 12:34 I see what looks like a decent height commercial tower with 1 microwave dish in view and what appears to be several side mounted UHF broadcast antennas at the top. I'm a radio guy, but everything requires supply power to work! One of your substation or switchyard videos had a microwave tower in it, but I'm sure its role needs to remain proprietary, unfortunately! In the US, we can figure out broadcast and commercial radio facilities from their FCC licenses, I'm not sure if IC provides similar data online.
I'm in CL&P territory (central Connecticut) and a good amount of their equipment looks very similar to what you work with, minus the stainless steel transformers near the shore! I have always been a fan of utility infrastructure, previously hoping to work in telecommunications.
The scenic drive to the customer location was also a nice treat! Thank you for these videos, Aaron!
New to your channel but completely familar with the electrical service and lineman repair part. I live in a small town called Centralia, MO home of A. B. Chance. Now owned by Hubble power systems. They make Helix anchors line gear. Switch links, cutouts and hotstick hardware including a plastic department that makes the poxy poles used in the overhead line work and the extend a sticks. Keep up the good work.
You ever have concerns about traipsing through the woods out there alone? Either crazy people or even just personal injury like twisting an ankle (really talking more about where there isn't cell phone coverage). I've talked to the local EMC guys a bunch, and there's some properties out here where they won't go on them without a sheriff accompanying them. Some of this mountain people think the power guys are the "gubment" and are out to rip them off or whatever. Real flakes, for sure, and potentially dangerous.
He is likely required to wear 8 or 9 inch work boots, that should aid ankle support.
Here in Quebec, Canada, the âpower-guysâ actually *ARE* in reality, âthe gubmentâ, since Hydro QuĂ©bec is a Crown Corporation. In other words: there literally can be no competition, because the Crown has Charted over to them the power to make the power, and to sell the power, they also own the power, so they control the power, if you complain, or donât pay yerâ bill, or (God forbid) try to sell your own âhomemadeâ power, they will shut off your power, shut you down, seize your assets, and then youâll be blacklisted, and you may no longer be sold any power, not even a AAA batteryâs worth... thus, they have all the power, because those who provide the power, *ARE* the power, do you understand? So always, always, obey the power!
Theyâve been rippinâ people off for decades... A book, 8â thick could easily be written exposing them thoroughly. Iâm not sayinâ I condone shooting at emâ or anything, thatâs definitely a big âNo, Noâ, but having a desire to live âoff-gridâ, in oneâs own domain or a homestead, free from the dependance upon their âconvenientâ power-grid mafia, somewhere deep in the woods, is certainly understandable...
I tried to warn youse guys when themâ âsmartâ meters began being offered to customers. At first, folks had the right to refuse emâ, but once you agree, and sign contract, now you may NEVER again dispute nor contest any bill they send you, you must pay, no exception, even if you know thereâs an error, you are frozen, and powerless, because they own the meter, and only THEY can read and interpret its data, which is sent automatically to them (or it will be soon, once fully implemented, just wait...).
Welcome to the future, the future where you may no longer resist the power, because the Hydro guy has got you pinned down with his boot and heâs crushing your windpipe...
Learn how power works, consider solar, wind and wood stoves. Those who are wise will survive.
Amen.
In my experience working utility's all the negative encounters I've had were with city folk
As a dispatcher (operator) of distribution, I always feel bad sending Line to a dud call... What a waste of your time.
these videos are great for JOE PUBLIC to watch and educate . I hope your district management lets you continue .
Awesome chain bro
I went out to PEI as apart of the telecom restoration team and it was pure carnage.... never seen so many down poles before in my entire career. Was a blast though, got to work with a bunch of hydro guys.
Thank share great video
Being FSEng. and telling a customer I can not find the problem, a customer hear there is no problem, when it could be Intermittent problem or youâre at the wrong location or wrong instrument
Getting a lineman wage to hike through the beautiful wilderness for a few hours sounds okay
Cutout of line splice is super cool always wondered how those work. Our dirt road power lines have lots of those fem trees falling over the years.
Thanks for taking us along!
Thanks for sharing. You still make it interesting and I learned more info. Love this
Have you run across Bigfoot on your adventures into the wilderness đ€Łđđ€Łand oh yeah do you also take that chain off and all jewelery when working on Low voltage and HV lines
Yes and yes. đŹ ... I mean, No and Yes
Great stuff as always, Aaron! Thank you again! Cheers! đ
Thanks for the Video Aaron. Always a nice ride in the country!
đŻ%đ
The good old "unfounded ticket".
thanks!
Iâve had some goose chases on storm calls too, it happens man! More than most people would think
Good deal Aaron.
Thanks John!
im a pre apprentice electrician and i am thinking about doing lineman as my advanced training bob has taught me alot about linemen
That same storm effected Boston NY but not as bad but we got soaked . I get calls like that some times. I work inside the home or business. today Nov 5th 2022 79F super windy. đ
Southwest Missouri here, another great video your videos are always interesting. Just curious though do you ever run into bears or anything like that out in the boonies
The economy being bad and the price of gasoline going up I also have noticed how bad crime has become and I wonder how many people are resorting to crime that never would have before.
It is terrible to live having to worry about everything being stolen especially when you're in a rural area where you're used to leaving everything unlocked
Where I live now I lived here in the 80s and literally you could leave your house unlocked and never have to worry but now even with security cameras monitoring 24 hours a day people still will steal cars and break into homes and it just scares the hell out of me because we've had so many home invasions with guns and people tie up the homeowners and beat them some to death and I just don't understand why there's so much anger
Wha those records are better than here
11:52 Strong "does _anybody_ know where I am" vibes, but I guess you don't have that problem (on the job, at least) đ
Our smart meters tells our DA if the powers on or off
Pretty typical after a storm to get duplicate calls for service. Towards the end of a storm we often get a few calls that someone else was at & they hadnât called it in yet? Just a pain having to drive that far away to find out itâs ok on arrival.
Thanks for showing a typical nuisance call that lineman get. Homeowners typically call their vacation property or cabin & if they donât get an answer think the power is still out. It could be a CATV line still down?
Thanks again Aaron! đđ»đđ»
SuggestionâŠ.weâre you thinking of featuring line tools or hardware no longer used or obsolete? I have a couple items that might be considered old or obsolete? Iâd be willing to shoot a quick video or picture & send it to you.
I was fortunate enough while on a crew a few weeks ago to notice 2 date nails from the 1930âs. I summoned the young guys down from their buckets at the end of the job to show them where they would be found & remove them themselves. They were tickled to finally see them after all this time time.
I love your channel & wait with anticipation like a little kid on Christmas morning for your next video.
Should do your giveaway via IG so you can control all aspects Aaron! Stay safe out there buddy
I agree that IG is probably the safest!
Friggin scammers always gotta try and ruin it for everyone đ€Ź
Watching from England, as a bit of a nerd I guess! deprived of anything meaningful on our own "national grid" i've resorted to taking an interest in yours lol.
Your call center must be as horrible as ours. We get âoutage â calls for summer homes with WiFi cameras not working.
Question on Pole Numbers Does the company have a description of the Pole and any attached equipment in a database? Such as "Pole 1 is a 20ft wood pole with a Transformer" I ask because here in California PG&E Always wants a Pole number when a Crash takes one out! I always suspected the they want to know what to bring.
Absolutely! I can click on the pole on my computer and get every bit of detail, including wire size.
It's not 100% accurate all the time, but pretty good! đ€
Do you every run into bears when you out in the sticks? It sure is pretty up there with all the trees. I'd love to live in the middle of nowhere. I just don't want to get eaten by a bear.
14:42 pretty sure that boot is what they connected my pad Mount 7200 volt transformer to my new meter pedestal
Sleeve looks like a Chinese finger trap
Hope this isn't off topic, but for a sec it looked like the beginning of a video game, like Slenderman, when you were headed to that second 'camp' as you called it, lol
Any topic is fair game! Infact, some say the costume I dress up in to take the kiddos out for Halloween looks like slender man! đ»đ» I posted a vid of a similar costume a few years back
I see a nice box of dead break elbows, load break elbows and splice quick kits there, how common is it for a lineman to do a tape splice on underground distribution cable?
We used to, now they're pretty well all splice kits with a cold shrink
Does your under ground use a lot of 600 amp elbows ? Do they use them for T type connection in manholes Data centers I work on used them on transformers and vacuum switches
That pole numbering system, how would you deal with the insertion/removal of poles? I understand it, but my thinking is that a map would be helpful. I'm pretty sure you have that on you computer in the truck.
Oh yeah, she's all mapped out on the laptop. An insertion would be an "A" pole. So poles would go from:
135, 136, 137
To
135, 135A, 136, 137
We also have the occasional "135R1 and 135RR1" if a pole is added on an existing property for a street light or garage service pole.
Great question đ
Could you please make a video on how to mount a fuse cutout please?
Why thatâs boring lol? A kid could do it.
How often to you have to patrol transmission lines if you get unexplained trips?
333 thumbs up
Always appreciate seeing ya here and commenting Steve! đđ€ 37
That pole numbering system makes sense, but I can see how it can get complicated quickly once you encounter branches off branch lines, you start getting several digit.
Maybe the universe just felt you needed a couple hour drive in the countryside, no problems, no people.
750 kcmil copper...crackhead's delight
It certainly does! Sometimes there's multiple feeders off the same line... Usually they'll add letters at that point. Rather than just A, B, C etc... They'll use the letter that represents the main Rd/community. ( Main street = 8004_M84R34...)
And I'll take the free trip! Lol .. nice little "windshield time" break lol.
Thief's love the 750... It's rarely left de-energized đ
@@Bobsdecline I do a lot of commercial renovations. Any time we've had a building vacant for a while, I get worried. Alarm systems and cameras don't deter them anymore. I've had to rebuild a few services that were ravaged by copper mites.
Oh it's brutal now đ. We've had multiple buildings stripped while energized. A few started some pretty bad fires. It's a wonder nobody was hurt ... that we know of.
Do the outage reports include a callback number for the person reporting so if you canât find it you can call back for more info?
Is this better or worse than the time when our broadband went down, and when we phones them, they tried resolving the issue remotely, but were unsuccessful, and so they said they would have to get someone to come out, and only a few minutes after the call ended, the broadband came back
Is there a reason that you didn't open the gate the chain that was across the road and Drive-In versus walking in ?
If they could phone to say they had no power they should be able to phone back to say its back
Well they called saying they didnât have power, and all of a sudden it was back. They figured it was fixed.
I understand the importance of numbering a pole. But with that system if you reconfigure a circuit then you have to re-label every Pole or at least rename every pole. Do you not have GPS coordinates for all Transformer Banks and meter bases?
Everything is GPS'd. Adding a pole mid span will become an "A" pole.
Ie: pole 500,501,502 will become 500, 500A, 501 etc...
If those are modern addressable meters, can't they tell they're online? Sure, someone needs to eyeball the area to properly close out the ticket, but you should know before you get there it's not a "power out" situation.
(Unless it's like my farm where idiots stole the meter. The power company could tell it was on, but not where it was.)
The company should have a way for you to Ping the meter. Confirm power outage before going to the location
They can do that in the ONCOR system in the DFW market here in Texas, all the old GE mechanical meters were changed out to Landis-Gyr smart meters with remote cutoff capability!
@@uploadJ All our meters here are those. When I first moved here they told me Poll the meters once a day to get the readings, but as soon as I hooked up my shortwave rig I found that the meters were constantly sending datagrams and it was about every 10 seconds and the ARRRRRNNNN data blast went over the entire lower end of the shortwave spectrum.
Unlike cable TV wires and phone wires that have a foil jacket around them to block any signals from escaping the wire, electric wires have ZERO insulation and they broadcast the datagrams 24/7 365 in a continuous blanket killing all shortwave communication below 15 MHz
It really really sucks
I talked with the power company till I was blue in the face and even had one supervisor come and see what they were doing.
He said they know what it does to shortwave radio and they were not getting rid of the meters, so live with it.
For the most part the military has abandoned all frequencies below 15 MHz
It is so bad that many times you can't even listen to AM radio stations the electric meters are that powerful.
@@ocsrc re: "but as soon as I hooked up my shortwave rig I found that the meters were constantly sending datagrams"
Well, there are two things. First, these Landis-Gyr meters 'sweep' from AM thru shortwave (I have video of it) AND they communicate on 900 MHz via 'data packets' - I have video of that too using an HP 8591E spectrum analyzer ... they make a horrid racket on the shortwave bands, and I operate 160 meters where they sweep thru, as well as 80 meters and a little higher ...
â@@uploadJI *so* look forward to smart meters here then. *NOT*
I had the power company out on Wednesday. They installed a meter box surge protector (they were running a free install promo), but it has a $10/mo fee with it. Not too happy about the fee, but the added protection is always a good thing. So I now have Level 1 (meter box), Level 2 (distribution panel) and Level 3 (surge protection outlet strips/UPSes) on most of my electronics. I wanted the meter box one to help protect all of my solar hardware. I really don't want that stuff to cook if a surge comes along.
Where I live the power company does not install surge protection it is up to the homeowner to get from their electrician. A level 1 surge protector at the meter would cost you about $800 including installation so that would be paid off after about 6 years.
You can be pretty sure the power company will be jacking the monthly fee up eventually to $11, $12 etc...
Anyways it is a really good investment to have L1+L2+L3 protection, for the customers that have installed it not a single one have had damaged equipment afterwards (I'm an IT supplier).
@@mrfrenzy. I had asked the solar installers if they offered meter box surge protection and they said they don't - the power company doesn't allow anything in the box except their meter; they don't even like having amp clamps on the cables and pitch a fit over that. I had found Leviton meter socket surge protection devices for like 250, but if the power company saw it, they could cause me a lot of problems.
That's an Itron smart meter, why can't you look at the reports from it and tell the power is on from the head office?
It's just an RF model... Smart meter retrofit is coming very soon and will eliminate a lot of these calls
What "infrastructure" does the Itron meter normally 'talk to'? Here in the ONCOR system the meters 'chat' with each other (they form a mesh network and can relay messages using the US ISM band in the 900 MHz range, not cellular) until a they reach a radio 'node' that connects to fiber or cable that is where the front office can send and receive messages to the meter network.
Do you carry any protection when you go out in the woods such as bear spray?
Us Canadians joke that bear spray is there so the bear can season you with pepper before consuming you.
If I'm not mistaken, they made carrying pepper spray illegal in urban areas at least.
Do you guys still have dial reads? Or all ERTs?
Still a few dials kicking around, quite a few actually! We're soon doing a complete overhaul with smart meters. (With a cost associated opt out)
Don't you have smart meters up there and just see which meters are showing offline to know what is actually out?
Not yet, but very soon!
Don't you have smart Meters that can tell you there is power on the line ?
They're coming very soon and will help eliminate these bogus calls
@@Bobsdecline ... customer education on my end helped a fair bit over the years. If they were interested, I would show them the meter and explain that if you see the moving wheel or readable numbers then your power is on, and the problem is inside the house. If you don't see the numbers or the wheel isn't turning, then call the power company. When they asked why they needed to know this I told them it helps with getting the power problem solved faster. I mean, who wants to sit in the dark longer than they have to, right?
Dumb question: Is the 'Two man rule' just two people, or does it require two people AND two trucks? If it's just two people, then wouldn't it make sense to have two person crews go out on the more distant calls so that if you do need two people to do the required work, you can get right on it, rather than sitting around while you wait for someone else to show up?
Not a dumb question at all!
Two man = person only
I'd say about %70 of my out of town calls are rectified using hot sticks or single person work. - If the call indicates something that I suspect requires a second man, I'll arrange the extra help. Often times those calls are emergencies though and I'll head out so I can isolate and ground the line.
All that being said; Even for 1 man calls, I'll sometimes bring a second guy if I've had a long day or if it's late at night.
I've never been refused extra help when requested
Thank u for what you do .. I'm retired lineman
Can't help but wonder if someone was hoping for some free tree trimming/removal, during your investigation of nothing?!?đ€
Why do you wear a chain? Any extra conductive material should be a no.
Chains come off while working