While on standby I had to get the streetlights going at the Mc Leod substation, West Auckland which controls a large area of streetlights, about (5000 SL's).

area: Gleneden, Kelston, Glendene which were in the dark after initially was thought the lightcell failed on the substation roof.
The local faultman had switched the lights on and off manually the night before.
I didn't have a spare one with me but I did have a good quality electromechanical AEG astronomical timeclock, hence this was my temporary solution.
Then a 33 kV fault happened in Albany so I had to prioritise that job first.
At around 02.00 hrs that morning I drove by and the whole area was dark again, O deer the clock had stopped, but that wasn't the problem.
The master relay, just a 240 Volts 2 pole octal had high resistance contacts and by tapping it sparks within made it make and break the 6 outgoing SL circuits. I had a spare one of those and fitted a new one, problem solved. As I always do , I took a load check just in case.
Well this 10 Amp relay had a steady current of 13 Amps inductive load on it hence it's demise.
On the control panel 3 out of the 6 neons were going but the fuses were ok.
So I replaced the faulty Neons, Not easy but with some tube and wrenching them out I got 2 out eventually and one broke off.
Well, worry about that after a nights sleep.

Next morning, at the depot one of my workmates saw the Neons and saw a hole blown into the base of it. I have never seen that before but 2 Neons had actually a hole blown in the base by an electrical surge.
I will post the photo's via Trumpy so you can have a look at these Neons.
I accidentally cracked one of the Neons with my car keys in my pocket, but the base is still intact.

Later that day I heard from a faultman that lightning a few weeks ago had hit the pilots and obviously found a good neutral by flashing over in the Neon lamps base and frying the internal resistor.

Friday I fitted a 40 Amp contactor to drive the actual streetlight load, so the master relay only has to drive the contactor coil load. (± 80 mA).

Also I checked hour meter readings and reinstated the lightcell which functioned allright.

To complete that all was OK, I scoped the job @ 23.00 hrs as part of streetlight patrol. and had a chat with the Pizza shop for the shutdown at 24.00 hrs to take the generator off while repair crew replaced the damaged cables.

OK Here's the pictures:

Hole blown through base of neon indicator by power / lightning surge on Hotwater control panel:




I broke the glass from the LHS Neon with my car keys unfortunately.

Same Neons but different angle.
The Voltage rating of 220 V is visible on the RHS Neon lamp:



{Note! This type of lamp has been used here for years on mains voltages of 230 - 240 Volts with no problems of early blackening.}

Substation H.W & S.L.. control panel. Note LHS lens cover off. this lamp completely disintergrated while I tried to pull it out.
Also needed a new E 5.5 bayonet fitting afterwards:



Temporary rake up with AEG timeclock to Master relay within back of control panel.
Little black box on top has an hour meter in it to monitor the lightcell output. [see if it reliably works it's ± 11 hours a night]:



The AEG time switch with 60 Amp contactor and hour meter to check it's output hours.
and a dutch Weber 6 Amp (green) diazed D2 fuse use for clock CCT protection:

Love those insulation tape labels on the panel. They could have at least cut the tape with sidecutters.

Faultmans job.

At least they labelled the circuits.

A lot of subs have labels missing or fallen off the panels
In this day and age unfortunately not much attention is given to it.

The white label I put on for the temp SL rake up via the timeswitch.

All is back to lightcell now.

You'd think that the Poco would employ someone to replace the insulaion tape labels with engraved traffolyte labels. In 5 years those insulation tape labels will be lying on the ground unreadable. Its probably very important that those labels are correct, so why not do it properly.

Temporary measures are fine but they need to be upgraded later.