I read this earlier. Poor sods.
Our boiler broke last week , we were fed up of the cold after a week. & that was in the mild South East.

as profits are put before maintenance

I thought SGN was a government owned company, similar to Scottish Water. Had to look it up and it’s definitely not. Every day is a school day.

We had a heater failure last winter when it was that cold.. With an electric immersion and a couple of small heaters we struggled through for a couple of days.

 the times our parents told us of waking up with ice on the inside of the house windows

LOL. That was normal for us when I was a kid.

Yeah I know but we are a generation apart. Possibly more.

My folks grew up on the farms then moved into civilization in the 90s where you don’t have to put up with that any more.

We moved back out of civilisation where power cuts are frequent and lengthy

In South Africa the power goes off on a regular basis. They call it “load shedding”. Consequently nearly everyone has at least one generator in the garage and a nice big BBQ to cook on.

My personal experience is that “electric off” is bareable (but a pita) whereas water off, which also happens fairly often over there, takes you back to primitive living within a couple of hours!

Meh.

2010 (the really cold one) our electricity went off for a week, in a house with only storage heaters.
We did three days/nights living in one room with a borrowed gas heater and my camping stove on the patio. It was -11 the third night outside.

We bailed out to my work where we joined the staff team living in the outdoor centre lounge, heated by open fire. 😎🔥🔥🔥😎

I was the same with the nice patterns on the inside, much healthier than central heating softies now ,killed the bugs overnight, getting dressed under the covers. Non of these Hungarian goose doovies like the one I’ve got now

And a bath once a week whether you needed it or not.

But the nice company are handing out free heaters and cookers to affected residents,how long before the electric grid is overloaded and goes into melt down,also what about pipes freezing, and loss of production for factories and loss of trade for shops,offices closed and schools closed, due to no heating.

Since many of those houses probably had electric heating 30 years ago, used 2-3x as much power for lighting 10 years ago, and are better insulated these days I doubt the load on the electric grid is going to kill it. Its probably like a christmas day with everyone having loads of showers, hairdryers, using the oven, all the TVs running etc.

If there’s electric heaters there won’t be frozen pipes. If the offices/shops/schools close there will be less demand on the electric system so less likely to melt down as you predict. (Its kind of a Scottish Bank Holiday tomorrow anyway – so many places may not be too bothered).

Going to be huge claims for compo probably.

I’ve not read the T&Cs for a while – but I’m guessing there is either no compo or it will be fairly small. Otherwise your arguments about cost before maintenance would be contradictory. Commercially my providers were always very clear – sort your own contingency plans… I suspect the cost of mobilising the engineers, gaining access to properties (and securing them afterwards), staffing helplines, providing heaters etc – is actually a bigger cost than the compensation.

zippykona

…Ice on the inside was perfectly normal….

And I liked to sleep with the window open. Too soft for that now.

Try living 11yrs without central heating, shaving with a hot kettle and not owning a bath.

Just an electric kettle and shower

2010 was fun watching my breath hover in front of me at eye level in my bedroom/living room due to it being -12 out in the middle of no where with no electric heaters even

Majorbummer!

You are Guy Grieve and i claim my 5 pounds

I thought SGN was a government owned company, similar to Scottish Water. Had to look it up and it’s definitely not. Every day is a school day.

We do a lot of work with utilities companies, have learned recently that SSE (electrical suppliers) are mostly owned by Spanish Government, or at least private individuals using Spanish Government money. Either way, they are severely understaffed and can only just barely achieve the statutory maximum allowable time scale for responding to connection requests, e.g. usually 45 days for a response to a request, and they charge for the privilege!

Still better than Scottish Water who are so inept/understaffed/incompetent that it can take them a year to assess a connection application, and their response can be so cryptic and non-sensical that even experienced engineers can’t make heads nor tails of it. Never fear though, for an additional fee Scottish Water Horizons will help de-mystify Scottish Water’s comments in order that you can actually progress with your connection. It’s like printing money for them…

I do worry about the state of the water networks and SW’s actual knowledge of what is below ground. Our village is being dug up at the moment as they attempt to connect 1 house to the mains. Problem is they can’t find the mains! One of the main roads was dug up in an effort to find what turned out to be an empty old cast iron pipe, so the road was re-enstated and the OTHER side of the road dug up instead to find the correct mains. I would almost like to work for them just to learn what goes on behind closed doors!

That’s not specific to Scotland.

Yeah, just wasn’t sure what the English system was, suspected it was all privatised?

SGN are a good example of how a private provider can be relatively good, haven’t dealt with private water suppliers yet…

We do a lot of work with utilities companies, have learned recently that SSE (electrical suppliers) are mostly owned by Spanish Government, or at least private individuals using Spanish Government money

That doesn’t sound right, are you not thinking of Scottish Power who are a subsidiary of Iberdrola?

As for Scottish Water, been there. Seemingly a lot of the issues stem from installations done by local authorities who knew where everything was and where it went but never bothered passing the info on. We have a sewer serving the houses around us under our extension that they never knew about as well as an old cast iron gas main that SGN never knew about either. The water main stop cock was also a mystery until the builders found out the hard way that the wrong one had been identified (and still somehow tried to blame me because they never checked it was off before they cut it). But yeah, Scottish Water were actually pretty good to deal with IIRC, everything went through Buchanan House if that helps.

From the BBC link above.

“Compensation of £30 will be paid to customers for every 24 hours they are without gas.”

Will cover the higher leccy bills anyway.

From the BBC link above.

“Compensation of £30 will be paid to customers for every 24 hours they are without gas.”

Will cover the higher leccy bills anyway.

They are talking about the weekend I should be up £200 by then

seems there have been outages already.

Not quite “melt down” that you predicted though – a few very local, very brief outages whilst someone at SSE wakes up. And the forecast is to stay warm…