Indian power loss, leakage?

Yikes!

I once designed an electric meter for use in India, and it had extensive anti-tamper hooks. Seems like a lot of power is stolen. Military vets seem to feel that they are owed electricity for free.

Spillage as opposed to leakage. :-)

Don...

Due to cheap work force, it's cheaper/easier to add new wires than to untangle existing ones.

StoneThrower

I get the impression that a lot of those wires are added by the customers.

I read somewhere that maybe 10% of the power in New York City was stolen. People drill through walls to tap into their neighbors circuits, often in both directions.

That's disgusting !! You would think they could keep those poles painted to maintain a sense of order.

Rheilly P

The bigger the mess, the better it works.

Beirut Lebanon telco switch and wiring.

Note how carefully each wire is labeled.

One of my customers at his best:

Sounds like green energy to me. Someone should suggest it to Obama.

ct-wiring-up-india/

FWIW, AVG reports a JavaScript exploit threat when loading that page.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Now we know where Maynard learned to do electrical inspections.

So, 99% of call centers are down? ;-)

I haven't had one telemarketer call since that power failure.

I read that during WWII the British secret service in Turkey attempted to tap the German embassy phone, but gave because they simply couldn't find the appropriate connections in the mess of cables.

Who let the cat out of the bag? ;-)

Had the same thought Michael. I may have serious withdrawal symptoms, if it keeps up for too long!

Don...

"Customers" ?

Sylvia.

keeps up for too long!

I can't say that I'll ever miss calls from the con artists from 'Credit Card Services'. I've been on the 'Do Not Call' list since it first came out, but a lot of greedy bastards ignore the laws. Some have called so may times that I curse them out for waking me up. One that really pissed me off called themselves 'Air Force One' heating and air conditioning.

We can only hope that it lasts indefinitely. Has been great without those stupid scammers calling 5 times every day.

Evidently they haven't heard of a demark box. ;-)

Highly likely. However, during that time, pole to pole wiring was arranged so that long parallel wire runs were reduced by swapping wires between poles (wire transposition).

This was to reduce crosstalk between wires. It looked like messy wiring, but was intentional. Maybe they just continued the practice inside the embassy.

During the 1980's, most of the phone systems I was working with were switching from 25 pair bundles and "push button" phones, to electronic phone systems that ran on anywhere between 2 to 8 wires. Rather than remove the 25 pair cables from the overhead, new wires were simply added. When we had an earthquake in 1989, the weight of all the cable in the suspended ceiling caused several of them to collapse. At one office, I hauled off 3 pickup truck loads to the recyclers.

The same problem occurs in the phone rooms. As tenants at an office building move in and out, the various telco wiring installers simply add wires, and leave the unused wires in place. Here's one that I cleaned up, before and after.

this looks much more organised :)

-Lasse