Milton (along with Landbeach and Waterbeach) has been plagued with “brown outs” for the last week or so culminating with a number of short power cuts yesterday afternoon and evening.

Today I’ve spoken to an engineer at EDF and the news is not good. The fundamental problem that they have is that one of the two “tap changers” (devices which move the ferrous core up and down inside the transformer to fine tune the output voltage) at the main sub-station has broken so they’re finding it difficult to get enough power to feed the area.

He say that it will be a while before this problem can be resolved as the manufacturer of the tap changers has a waiting list for repairs. They’re also laying a new cable down the A10 to help the situation, but that’s going to take a while too.

The bottom line is that they are predicting that we will continue to experience low voltage supply, brown outs and power cuts for another four to six weeks as they juggle the supply to try to continue to give us enough electricity.