We're on the water company's list, on the basis that if I'm not here, barakta's ability to carry water home from the shop at the end of the road isn't something she can rely on. So far this has resulted in one random delivery of bottled water before some works that didn't actually cause an outage. The brief outages (including that caused by nextdoor's builders
[1]) we have had haven't been long enough to be a problem.
The electricity supply has been pretty reliable, even during the Great Selly Oak Substation Meltdown of 2012 it was only off for a couple of hours. The worst we normally get is a glitch that's enough to set off every burglar alarm in the area, but not long enough to cause computers to reboot.
But the voltage has been creeping down since Christmas. Yesterday's stats (accumulated from 5-minutely readings of the not-especially-calibrated UPS) give: Average:230.79V Max:243.10V Min:206.18V. I saw a minimum of 209V when I left a decent multimeter logging at 1-second intervals over the evening peak the other day. I suppose that's out of spec enough to be worth reporting...
ETA: I plotted a graph. Averages of averages, so don't read much into the actual figures. I note a correlation with university term starting on the 14th, but the overall trend is longer-term than that...
![](http://www.ductilebiscuit.net/stuff/voltagegraph6month.svg)
I think I'll wait until next week though, in the interests of random engineers not turning up and confusing barakta while I'm away over the weekend.
(Which is what happened when I reported a water leak that I discovered on a country lane a while ago: It seems that information submitted via the handy click-on-the-map and verbal description bits of Severn Trent's leak reporting web form doesn't actually make it to the engineers, so they turned up to my home address expecting to find a leak instead.)
[1] As soon as I spotted the water main in the hole they were digging I filled some water carriers. That they broke the pipe was entirely consistent with their level of competence up to (and indeed after) that point.