That’s a Good Question: What happens when your power goes out?

Ever wondered what’s actually happening behind the scenes when your power goes out?

For the latest in our That’s a Good Question series, we caught up with faultman Ashton to answer a few of the questions people have about power outages, from why finding a fault can take time to some of the more unusual things that can cause one.

Why does it sometimes take a while to find a fault?

Finding a fault and how long it takes can depend on lots of things.

If you live further away in places like Kāwhia or Arapuni, it can take us an hour to an hour and a half just to get there.

Once we arrive, we still need to find where the fault is and work out what has caused it before we can get on with fixing it.

Why does my neighbour have power but I don’t?

Most of the time, if your neighbour has power and you don’t, it’s because the fault is isolated to your property.

Every house has its own set of fusing, so an issue affecting your supply won’t necessarily affect the house next door.

Why can’t you turn the power back on straight away?

Often, we can’t turn the power straight back on, and sometimes we actually have to turn more of it off.

That’s because we need to create a safe working space for our crews before they can find and repair the problem.

What are some of the different causes of faults you’ve seen?

There can be some pretty unusual ones.

I’ve seen rats get into transformers and shut down the whole transformer by blowing the high-voltage fuses.

We’ve also seen bulls rub against power poles and stay wires. That can cause the lines to clash, trip the whole feeder and turn a lot of people’s power off.

Those ones can be pretty hard to spot!

Who do I call if my power goes off?

If your power goes out and you haven’t been notified about an outage, check our outages page first to see if we’re already aware of it.

If it’s not showing, give Waipā Networks a call on 0800 800 769. We can let you know what’s happening if we have information available, or log the fault so we can get someone out to investigate.

Got a good question?

There’s a lot that happens behind the scenes when the power goes out, from tracking down what caused it to making the area safe and getting the power back on.

That’s a Good Question is our chance to answer some of the things people ask us about our network and the work our teams do.