Gary Peterson (VP of Engineering), George Kornreich (Volunteer Board Member) and an electrical contractor have been spending a lot of time this summer repairing and upgrading the 8,100-foot electrical power line that brings energy to our site. We estimate that the age of the power line to be 35 years and over that time the mountain, weather and critters have taken their toll. In some places the insulation has been completely eaten away. In order to avoid a catastrophic failure during the winter months when we could not access the line we spent most of the warmer months finding and correcting problems.
To find the defects the complete line was scanned with a fault-finding device to locate the problems. This meant walking the entire line and taking measurements all the while. When a problem was located the line was dug up and the problem repaired. We got most of the major faults this summer, but we'll be out there again next summer to look for more.
During the last week of August the power line was upgraded by the addition of a 240 volt to 480 volt step-up transformer that doubled the transmission-line voltage. By doing this we greatly reduced the troublesome voltage variations that caused problems with some of the equipment on Baldy.
Both the repairs and the upgrade were accomplished with little or no interruption in our broadcasting due to our solar energy backup system. When we were working on the line we simply switched to solar power which gave us a few hours of alternative energy to safely work on the line.
Photos of several faulted power line sections that were removed and repaired can be seen here.
Thanks to your contributions and the work of volunteer Board members like George and Gary, we can keep a variety of radio and TV programming coming into Summit County.
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