Transformer fire cuts power to various parts of Pretoria and Centurion

mylesillidge

mylesillidge

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Widespread power outages in one of South Africa’s biggest cities

Residents are experiencing power outages in various regions in Centurion and Pretoria. A fire at the Waltloo substation and an emergency power supply shutdown to the Njala Line 1 have knocked out power to several areas.

According to a statement from the City of Tshwane, the Waltloo Transformer 1B caught fire in the early hours of Thursday, 24 April 2025.
 
porchrat said:
This is municipal ineptitude on an incredible scale.

I'm glad I'm not living in those municipalities.
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Well it seems like it is not only some municipalities. Know about people in Jburg having had load reduction this morning. Centurion out this morning because a number of sub station went "down".

Issues in Pretoria East and all down.

Just too much of a coincidence.
 
KikzAzz said:
Well it seems like it is not only some municipalities. Know about people in Jburg having had load reduction this morning. Centurion out this morning because a number of sub station went "down".

Issues in Pretoria East and all down.

Just too much of a coincidence.
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Not a coincidence at all. Muni does load reduction because a ton of illegal connections are on some substation so they either do load reduction or the substation explodes because it physically can't handle the peak load placed on it by all those connections. They don't have the political will to effectively remove illegal connections.

Substations go down from poor maintenance and not doing load reductions when there are illegal connections.

Your municipality isn't competent. Why are you surprised they can't manage your local grid?

Unless you're saying you think your municipality actually does do decent world class maintenance so it's absolutely impossible that these things could happen as a result of poor maintenance or unwillingness to deal with illegal connections so it must be some sort of conspiracy instead? In which case where exactly do you live I want to move to this utopia.

I'm in Cape Town. The sort of chaos you're describing doesn't happen here. This is not something happening country-wide with Eskom dictating clandestine loadshedding across the country. It's just you guys locally in your suburbs supplied by your kak muni. Your suburb in isolation doesn't matter a fsck for Eskom's total grid generation. It's not even a percentage point of a single stage of loadshedding.
 
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Two sudden cold days and all hell breaks loose.
Winter is going to be barrels of fun.

I suggest everyone buys a spare keyboard now, get some more batteries for those routers, we're going to have some lekker threads on MyBB to moan on in a few weeks.
 
This was fun. My third outage in less than 24 hours and it lasted six hours. Now let's see what the load shedding schedule looks like from here on.
 
supersunbird said:
The half of Garsfontein getting fed by Highlands sub gets a power failure at minimum once a week, often more. Not 1 week has gone by this year without a power failure.
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Same here in JHB with the feed from the Observatory substation to the Bez Valley / Cyrildene / Kensington area as well - Wednesday it went off at 04h26 & was restored at 10h30 - so that's 6 hours - and today IT WENT OFF AT PRECISELY THE SAME TIME AGAIN - at 04h26 (what are the odds of that happening within 2 days of each other?) - and its STILL off now - NINE hours later... FFS! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
 
HAL 9000 said:
Same here in JHB with the feed from the Observatory substation to the Bez Valley / Cyrildene / Kensington area as well - Wednesday it went off at 04h26 & was restored at 10h30 - so that's 6 hours - and today IT WENT OFF AT PRECISELY THE SAME TIME AGAIN - at 04h26 (what are the odds of that happening within 2 days of each other?) - and its STILL off now - NINE hours later... FFS! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
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It's undercover loadshedding I tell you.
 
Aren't these substation fires caused by them not replacing the transformer oil which is a required maintenance item to prevent fires apparently as old oil forms water condensation which shorts **** out and thats how it starts, especially after a cool down period like loadshitting.
 
wingnut771 said:
Aren't these substation fires caused by them not replacing the transformer oil which is a required maintenance item to prevent fires apparently as old oil forms water condensation which shorts **** out and thats how it starts, especially after a cool down period like loadshitting.
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Maintenance is a Western paradigm and is not applicable for Africanacity 'service excellence' that the cANCer compatriots 'can see & touch'... ;)
 
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