As of today, Nelson Hydro will be turning off all circuit reclosers due to the elevated fire danger rating.
During times when the fire danger rating is high to extreme, the reclose setting is turned off to avoid the potential of starting fires as reclosers produce sparks when they automatically close.
Turning them off results in more frequent and longer outages since, without the reclosers, crews need to respond in person to patrol the lines to locate and manually restore power once the issue has been identified.
Nelson Hydro will turn the reclosers back on when the regional fire danger rating has stabilized to Moderate danger or below.
Thank-you for your patience.
In electric power distribution, automatic circuit reclosers (ACRs) are a class of switchgear that is designed for use on overhead electricity distribution networks to detect and interrupt momentary electrical faults. For overhead distribution networks, the majority of faults are transient, such as lightning strikes, surges or foreign objects (branches, birds) coming into contact with the exposed distribution lines. By this logic, 80% of outages can be resolved by a simple re-close operation as they make quick work of many line faults.