help with electrical pylons

[clark]

Does anyone know much about electrical pylons?

I'm thinking of buying a property in a semi-rural location and it has a pylon in the back garden. It's a double wooden pole type with a rectangular transformer suspended between them. It's looks pretty ugly. I'm assuming this is taking the voltage down to 400v for the house and the other houses on the street. Before the transformer, across the other side of a field, is another wooden pole, single, with three wires, which must be higher voltage but I don't know how high.

I'm just looking to understand what is there so that I know what I might be getting myself into if i buy the property.

Hope someone here might know. I have a couple of photos if that helps.

Thanks

 

[Andy™]

DNO's property. their responsibility to maintain it, they will also need access for routine maintenance & breakdowns. other than that, not really much else to say about it

 

[Geoff1946]

Ask your solicitor. I think there will be some legal paperwork between the supply authority and property owner.  These are quite common in rural areas.

I think you will have to live with it. It would cost a fortune to move even if you could force it, and you can't really screen it with trees unless you have a massive area as nothing tall will be allowed anywhere near it.

 

[binky]

Probably 11kV rather than the 400kV of the big pylons which do come with health warnings. There's a lot of legal stuff around these, lke whether or not the previous owner gave permission for the poles etc etc. Sometimes the DNOs just stick poles up without permission, which would offer grounds to insist it's moved at no cost to you. The upside is that they do offer a small payment for having the pole. £25 or something like that.

 

[ProDave]

The 3 wires across the field will be 3 phase 11KV , The transformer between the poles will convert that to 400V 3 phase which will be distributed to the houses as 230V single phase to each house.  Probably underground from the transformers to the houses but may be overhead.

You would expect something like that to be there with a wayleave to allow it to be so.  Your solicitor will check all the details.

For you buying that house the implications are it's damned ugly.  It might limit your ability to extend the house (you can't build within a certain distance of overhead lines) and might put off other buyers so it might affect the value of the property.

The DNO will have a right of access so could turn up at any time to work on their equipment.

 

[clark]

Thank you everyone for the super helpful replies.

@ProDave, it is transmitted to the houses overhead, on poles down the side of the house (only 3.5M away, so you are no doubt right that I could not extend. Then it goes out onto the main street. 10-20 houses in total. 

I checked and there is no easement in the title deeds. Even if there is a wayleave with the current owner I'm told they do not transfer over to new owners, and have exit clauses anyway. So I could give notice for removal. But that is a lengthy, uncertain, and potentially costly process.

I think I can only go ahead if I can see a good alternative location for the transformer. The main factor will be cost; whether the DNO can easily place it somewhere else, or not. I know where most of the other poles are but I don't know enough about how the circuits work to understand if another pole might be suitable instead. I could post a diagram if anyone here knows enough to have a look, otherwise I fear I will have to turn the property down. A shame because it would make a nice family home for us but it's at full price as if the equipment is not there.

 

[Andy™]

Thank you everyone for the super helpful replies.

@ProDave, it is transmitted to the houses overhead, on poles down the side of the house (only 3.5M away, so you are no doubt right that I could not extend. Then it goes out onto the main street. 10-20 houses in total. 

I checked and there is no easement in the title deeds. Even if there is a wayleave with the current owner I'm told they do not transfer over to new owners, and have exit clauses anyway. So I could give notice for removal. But that is a lengthy, uncertain, and potentially costly process.

I think I can only go ahead if I can see a good alternative location for the transformer. The main factor will be cost; whether the DNO can easily place it somewhere else, or not. I know where most of the other poles are but I don't know enough about how the circuits work to understand if another pole might be suitable instead. I could post a diagram if anyone here knows enough to have a look, otherwise I fear I will have to turn the property down. A shame because it would make a nice family home for us but it's at full price as if the equipment is not there.

it wont be cheap to get DNO to move it. best option would be to contact them and ask

 

[ProDave]

If there really is no wayleave then you could serve notice for them to remove their equipment, at which point they would start negotiating with you to buy a wayleave.  It would be very unlikely to lead to them actually moving it.

Can you post a satellite picture of the house, suitably anonymised?

There is a small parcel of land at the top of our road with a similar transformer and it's owner had the idea it could become a building plot, but the quote from the DNO to move the transformer was in the order of £50K

You are probably better off carrying on looking for another house, making my point that this will put some buyers off and devalue the property.

 

[clark]

Here's a satelite pic with the poles and lines annotated on top.

The road was built in the 50s and the power is coming from the left, where a few miles away is a high voltage line in the national grid. But this is the outer limit of the large village and you can see the main road to the right which has it's own set of power cables and there are many more houses on the other side of the road. They must all be fed from the same part of the grid ultimately, but through different lines running to them. A bit of me wonders if the DNO might agree to connect the street up from the main road, assuming there is capacity or it can be increased. But who knows.

I could ask the DNO as you suggest Andy, but that would potentially alert them to a problem and then they might go and ask the current owner to sign up to to an easement before I or someone else buys the property. That could be bad for the buyer but also the seller who might just see free money being offered at a time when they are wanting to move anyway and not realise that they are devaluing their property and potentially no one would then want to buy it, or pay as much for it.

As you suggest ProDave, I might be better off to keep looking because I don't want to fork out tens of thousands to fix the property's downside. I might be able to negotiate a bit off the cost of buying the property to cover it but not if its anything like £50k. I like to find solutions to problems but maybe this problem is too big. 

Sorry if image not very clear. Hopefully if you click on it you can see it bigger and see the yellow which is the property boundary and the red which is the DNO stuff.

 

[phil d]

I have several at work in our fields, you get that a lot on a farm, lol, anyway we had a run of 11kv overhead alongside the field by the house and to be honest it got to be a pain in the arse. However I was building some new stores and needed a new feeder so I decided to see how far I could push things, the agreement for having them on our land was due to expire in about 6 months so I got in touch with them and told them we would not be renewing the agreement and they'd have to remove their equipment from our land. I knew I had them by the short and curlies at this point for one simple reason, we own all the land in the area!

Anyway they sent a senior engineer to look at the alternative routes and he quickly discovered that there were none, he then came to see me and asked why I wanted it moved, it had been there for years without any problems, so why did it have  to go now? I explained to him that I was the new plant maintenance manager and I was making some changes, the line ran over a field entrance and it prevented us from investing in a bigger piece of equipment due to it's height and the difficulty in maintaining clearances with the line, we got something like a fiver a pole per year for having them and we had about 10 poles, so for fifty quid a year I didn't think the inconvenience was worth it. Plus the fact that they'd quoted me a ridiculous price for a new 200 amp three phase supply had been a step too far, my mind was made up, the poles had to go.

Anyway I left it at that, he went away to look at it and I sat back and waited, I didn't have to wait long!Their only other option was to bury it in the road, about 5 miles of trenches and a load of aggro, not to mention the expense, it was massive. Anyway this guy made me an offer, they'd remove the first five poles which took it past the front of the farm and the gate, they'd then bury it from the transformer along the edge of the field until the reached the point past the gate when it would go back on the  wooden pylons, and since they were working on it anyway they'd give me my new supply for free, I'd got what I wanted, lol.

We have some 400kv stuff as well in a couple of our other fields and apart from not being able to grow anything under the towers for access reasons we don't have any problems, if they want routine access they usually wait until we've harvested the crop, they then have a window of about 3 weeks to do what they have to do  beforre we re-sow for the next season, if they have to go into a cropped field they pay us for the loss of crop so it isn't too bad.

As others have said access can be an issue, but it doesn't really bother us, I'm not sure I'd want anything at the end of my garden at home though, it's far too restrictive, plus I've seen first hand what can happen when they catch fire or a transformer decides to go bang.

 

[ProDave]

Looking at your map, the transformer is on or close to your boundary.  If you did make enough of a fuss, they would just move it a couple of feet into the field margin, so you would not gain much, it would still be in view.

Re building an extension, you would probably have to pay to have the line running down the side of the house buried underground right up against your boundary.  That will likely be 3 figures cost,  but in the scheme of an extension may not be that significant.

 

[clark]

Sounds like you did really well Phil D. You sort of had them over a barrel a bit owning all the land. I don't even know for sure that the pole-mounted transformer in my case is in the garden, or on the other side of the boundary, though the stays supporting it are certainly in the garden. As ProDave says they could just move it back a few feet out of the garden entirely. Though they might also move it to the right out of sight (the neighbour might object but there are more trees there so they may not even notice). Still though the street is fed by the other poles on the properties land so I feel I'd have some chance of getting them to do something that suits me on that basis. But it would be a risk and uncertainty.

Another option, it seems to me , is that they move the transformer from it's current location to the previous pole in the field. It doesn't border anyone's garden there. Maybe the land owner would object but there are already poles there. It is only a hundred yards or so further back so I'm guessing it could work practically speaking. How close must the final distribution transformer be to the destination? That would remove the eyesore, leaving just one pole at the end of the garden which is easilier to tolerate. An improvement at least and perhaps they would be happy enough to do that.

That would leave the issue that I could not extend the house because of the remaining lines down the side of the house, and potential health risk and safety risks. I don't know if you can build that close to even an undergrounded wire, it would mean the extension being within a meter of it. Better yet would be if they actually moved it all off the property and supply the street's electricity from the main road. I don't know if that is possible. Perhaps those lines would not be able to take the extra load or something? I reckon it is at least 20 houses in the street.

 

[BorisJ]

I would never buy a property with pylons or even under overhead wires. Being a short wave radio listener I assure you then cause serious localised interference.