We paid for our electricity connection back in the Summer of 2020. Think I wrote earlier about the drama getting the electricity connected in the first place, and then more drama again when we had to move the metre into the house. All the time, we were waiting for the final piece of the electricity jigsaw to be done: connecting the underground cables that had been laid in April 2021 to a newly erected pole, so that we could take down the existing pole that was bang in the middle of our view.
For this connection to be done, the power had to be turned off for quite a lot of the peninsula – as it’s supplied via a single spur line from Salen to the lighthouse. During the pandemic and subsequent lock-downs, the electricity companies weren’t physically allowed to switch the power off for this type of work because of the disruption it would cause. Fair enough. Once this ban was lifted, there shouldn’t have been anything preventing the work being completed – but our job (understandably) was planned to joined together with other upgrading work that needed doing, so that the power wasn’t just being turned off for us.
From February 2022 this work was apparently ‘imminent’ – so said the 3rd SSEN Area Manager that I was now dealing with since the job started. Obviously doing in the summer made much more sense, with the longer daylight hours and less disruption to people. Unfortunately the July and August dates came and went. October was ‘definite’, but then it wasn’t. But finally in the first week of November the SSEN team landed, along with Eenie to do the digger work. New poles were erected – one replacing the existing one near Brightwater Lodge and the other to replace our existing pole but positioned further away from our house – and more than 18 months since they were buried in the ground, the underground cables were connected up. The anticipated 6 hour electricity shut-down ended up being 10 hours… with the power finally going back on at 8.30pm, which wasn’t ideal. And by the end of that long day, our pole was still in place! Fortunately Eenie came back the following day, and our old pole was removed – no longer at the forefront of every view and every photo.
It was worth the wait!
