electric fault detector & Underground cable theft detector

[ADELRESTA]

Hi there.well i need to design two things.first ,a computer/electronic system that could easily alert the central office of an electricity firm incase they is a problem at the customer's premises eg blackouts/shorts/fire/illegal connection.My idea here was to put up a monitor in all transformers and connect all these monitors to a computer with a customer made program that will easily interpret the monitors' feedback information.secondly i was also thinking of designing a 'theft alert system' and intergrate it in a telecommunication service provider underground cables which are frequently vandalised.

 

[justDIY]

i've heard about that, underground cable theft ... people just take a chainsaw to those massive thick cables and haul 'em away

hard to believe there is so much value in recycled copper?!

 

[Russlk]

Was there a question in your post?

 

[HarveyH42]

i've heard about that, underground cable theft ... people just take a chainsaw to those massive thick cables and haul 'em away

hard to believe there is so much value in recycled copper?!

Yeah, but you have to burn off the insulation to get the big bucks. Usually the neighbors don't like that. And recycling is meant to save the enviroment...

Anyway, a telecom company would be more like Cable TV, which is sort of a rip off of itself, so what's the difference, somebody is going to get it bending over anyway.

Seriously, don't think there is a simple bullet proof solution, once a "customer" figures out there is a tattle-tell monitor, they would just bypass it, remove it, or vandalize it. If you don't see who did the dirty work, you could only fix the problem and move on. What else are you going to do, tell the customers in the problem area to get a satelite dish, you don't want their $79/month any more?

Last year when my dog died, I dug a big hole near the edge of my property. Didn't even think about buried cables and such. I did find my sewer line though. Then again, never had cable TV, so what did I care....

 

[hizzo3]

now if everyone went to satilite, then we wouldnt have such a shortage on copper

 

[RODALCO]

ADELRESTA, Firstly it would be great that you fill all the fields in so we know what country you are from.

To attack a heavy utility cable with a chainsaw, you have to have no brains.
If you don't know the voltage level and or faultcurrent available, you are playing with your live.
The explosion will be enormous and the chainsaw operator will be most likely dead or heavily burnt if he survives.

Any form of video in transformer cubicles may be an idea but they are likely to get vandalised, prior to cable getting stolen.
Also what do you expect for an ETA for the faultman to be on site and possible police back up, if you don't want him to get knocked over and his ute stolen.
If this is a serious problem in your country it's time that the scrapdealers are required to ask for id if you have large quantities of scrap copper.

 

[Paul Obrien]

The telecommunications cables used to be pressurized and a fall in pressure was the best indication of a problem, apart from thousands of people without service. If ADELRESTA could clrify the problem ie what sort of service we could make less wild guesses.

 

[Oznog]

Thick power cables are the ones that get stolen. Recycling value for clean copper is like $3/lb. Anybody stealing thin telecom wire doesn't know how much trouble it's going to be to clean to get a tiny amount of copper. In the US, AFIAK telecom theft is nonexistant. Power line theft is rare but quite expensive and dangerous to the public. It's a significant problem in some areas of Russia, third world, etc where people are desperate, there are remote areas, and there's basically no money to replace the lines.

I think it's all above-ground power lines too that usually get stolen.

Telecom has a lot of fiber optic too, which has NO recycling value. But a stupid thief may not know that.

ALL telecom already has system diagnostics that can detect failure/theft up to the distribution box for that section of the neighborhood. Maybe up to the house's box too.

Many parts of the power lines here in the US also have diagnostic boxes at useful points which show where distribution breakers have opened up. Some also try to detect whether the line's drawing sparks to ground too.

 

[justDIY]

it wasn't but a few years ago where the SETI@home project was blacked out by cable theft, that's in Berkeley CA!

https://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/tech_news01.html

scroll toward the bottom, under the heading March 5, 2001