RESTORE
RESTORE provides temporary, safe connection to a faulted customer.
The problem of L.V. fault repair is one of the biggest facing the utility industry today with great pressure to restore supplies in increasingly short periods of time. In many cases there is a conflict between maintaining supplies at a reasonable cost, the cost of rapid repair and environment problems caused by working during the night. There is also the problem of the nuisance effect to the customer. Many of these problems can be alleviated by rapid reconnection of the faulted customers, even if this is only on a temporary basis while the fault is repaired.
The RESTORE is a system which allows the utility to provide a safe temporary connection to a residential customer who has lost supply due to an L.V. fault. The supply is provided by connection to a neighbouring customer or other source and running a heavy duty cable along or above the ground and into the faulted premises. The design of the RESTORE incorporates several features which make this connection inherently safe for both parties.
How RESTORE Works
The idea of providing a temporary supply isn't new, however the ability to provide a properly engineered temporary supply can present major difficulties. The RESTORE incorporates intelligent protection in the link which allows the supply to fail safe under all conditions and therefore give an inherently safe connection.
The RESTORE consists of three major elements; the source connection, the cable, and the restoration connection.
- The source connection is made at the customer fuse cut-out before the meter. This consists of a simple Live, Neutral and Earth connection. The temporary supply then passes through a circuit breaker before exiting to a custom heavy duty connector and cable.
- The standard 25m cable is double insulated, three core and flexible. It includes custom built lockable connectors.
- The restoration connection is again made at the customer fuse cut-out before the meter.
- Once all three elements are connected the circuit breaker at the source can be closed providing a temporary supply of up to 40A to the faulted customer. This is usually sufficient to run most households for the period of the outage.
