RESIDENTIAL HIGH-RISE CASE STUDY

Getting – and Keeping – the Lights Back On For Rental Apartment Residents

It was 11 pm on a Wednesday night when the lights went out throughout two adjacent residential towers in New Westminster, B.C., and the electrical contractors called to the site quickly realized that getting power back to the residents wasn’t going to be an easy fix. The main transformer for the two buildings was damaged and required replacement, so temporary power was an immediate need. A call to Trinity had the building up and running by 10 a.m. the next morning. But that was just the beginning of this assignment, which would end up lasting several months.

For the buildings’ owner, job one was simply getting electricity flowing ASAP to tenant apartments in the aftermath of the outage. The owner’s contractor called Trinity Power’s 24/7 service line three hours after the initial 11 p.m. outage, and within two hours Trinity technicians were at our shop prepping equipment for shipment that morning. Only a few hours later, lights and elevators were operating as usual.

But, while tenants’ lives went back to normal, the building’s managers still had a big problem on their hands. New transformers were estimated to take several months to manufacture, and the emergency diesel generator initially installed could become both expensive to fuel and create an ongoing noise annoyance. So, while keeping that generator – and the two residential towers – running for the initial three weeks after the outage, we also wanted to address the expense and aggravation the generator was creating. So, our power specialists sourced and landed a temporary transformer system to take the place of the damaged unit until it’s newly manufactured replacement could be put in place.

Temporary Power Equipment Needed:

• 500kW 120/208V diesel generator
• 5760’ in cable
• 100’ in cable mats
• Delivered 1200Litres of diesel fuel every day