Tema,- Mr Emmanuel Appoe, Tema Regional Engineer of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), has told customer that there was the need for planned maintenance at all times.
He said the less they planned for maintenance, the more outages will be experienced.
Mr Appoe who was interacting with some journalists at the Tema Sub-Station H, indicated that it was the resolve of the ECG to carry out planned maintenance on its primary stations regularly as a measure to prevent the equipment from developing faults.
He said some of the company’s equipment needed to be monitored and worked on before they developed challenges, stressing that the cost for repair for faults was always higher than planned maintenance.
He added that the ECG Tema Region, which spanned from Nungua Brigade, parts of Krobo, and Volta, as well as Ada and its surrounding areas, had 26 primary stations which needed to be maintained regularly.
Mr Appoe said it was his outfit’s regulations to maintain the stations twice a year, therefore their resolve to do regular maintenance at short intervals, to enable them to meet the needed plans for all the stations.
“The maintenance outage is to allow your power to be on for long, it is better that having no maintenance,” he said.
He added that; “it’s better to inform customers about outages to enable us do maintenance for some few hours than waiting for it to go off and now tracing the fault, and getting the needed resources for repairs.”
He therefore pleaded with customers within the ECG Tema Region to corporate with the company when announcements for scheduled maintenance was done.
Commenting on fuse and transformer copper stealing, he appealed to residents to be vigilant to prevent unscrupulous people from stealing them, saying the trend of stealing fuses had become escalated in Tema and was being extended to Volta.
Mr Appoe said the Tema Region had about 4,000 secondary substations supplying power to customers; therefore, it was virtually impossible to physically monitor all of them, therefore the need for residents to assist as the activities of the syndicate had adverse effect on their supply.
“When your light goes off don’t stay inside come out and check the transformer to help us apprehend such miscreants,” Mr Appoe stated.
Recounting an incident, he said in the past week, some of the miscreants went and off a transformer at Prampram, returned in the day with a vehicle and told people around that they were from ECG and had been asked to bring the transformer, they therefore succeeded in stealing the copper in it.
The Tema Regional ECG Engineer implored customers to always check the identity cards of persons who purported to be staff and take the details of the card before giving them access.
Source: Ghana News Agency