How come wet trees don't conduct electricity?

What's fun is losing one phase of a 3-phase system. This happened once in a factory where I was working - the computers were pretty much unaffected, but the shop lights were noticeably dim, and the compressor motor burned up.

Apparently, it cost the power company a whole bunch of money to replace equipment that had been damaged by dropping a phase.

Thanks, Rich

Ah. Our power is single phase, the hot wire is on the breaker, the ground wire isn't.

In many areas where lines pass thru trees, they use "tree wire" which is insulated in some way. They replaced about 200' near my calif house when they got tired of triming the trees all the time. Not sure what the difference is ... it looked pretty much the same as the rest.

So, you've never heard of the heartwood?

Yeah. They not only trimmed the trees to the ground out here in the Texas countryside, they also sprayed some green stuff on what was left of them. I asked where I could get some of the green stuff and they said it isn't available to the public.

Those stumps never came back and no suckers ever grew from the stumps. Powerful stuff.

A beaver once caused a tree to fall over onto the lines here. They never did catch the beaver, so it didn't get a dose of the green stuff.

Garlon

Hi, Garlon -

Your reply re-defines the word "terse".

John

Effective use of bandwidth.

A phase-fault relay would have taken care of that.

Some time ago the power company made some maintenance on the HV distribution and actually managed to reverse a couple of phases.

Nothing significant was damaged [*], but it did cause some consternation and a call to the power company asking WTF they were up to. And an additional couple of hours down-time until they got their act together.

- YD.

The dust and grime settling on the bark contains mineral salts which will make it a lot more conductive. Plus whatever is in the tree itself.

- YD.