Investing in Reliability

When you flip a light switch, you expect the lights to come on. When you plug in your phone, you expect it to charge. At Tri-County EMC, it is our job provide to you with reliable electric service to help make your life easier. We know outages interrupt your daily activities and we do our best to keep the power on at all times. 

Your cooperative is constantly working to keep your electric system up-to-date and increase its reliability. A major portion of our expenses go to reliability efforts. 

Reconductoring/Backfeed
As part of our system improvements, we routinely rebuild lines with larger wire that can handle more electric load. With these improvements, if a substation goes down, we have the ability to serve you from an alternate location to keep power flowing to you. This also allows us to perform maintenance on power lines without interrupting your service. 

System Automation
We are also improving our system reliability by installing automated switches and controls to automatically backfeed lines. This way, if there is a power outage, the effected area can be backfed by a different location before a lineman goes out to identify the problem. Many members who might otherwise have experienced a lengthy outage can be restored immediately. (66083001)

Fault indicators
We install fault indicators in strategic locations throughout our system. These fault indicators help us pinpoint the location of a power outage and allow linemen to quickly troubleshoot the problem. 

Vegetation Maintenance
The majority of our outages are caused by trees and vegetation growing into the power lines. Trees in the right-of-way are trimmed every five to seven years to prevent outages. Along with tree trimming, Tri-County also applys a blend of herbicides to vegetation, including trees and underbrush, to inhibit them from growing into right-of-way. Care is taken to not spray landscaped areas, ponds, streams or wetlands. More details on right-of-way trimming can be found here.

Communication
The more information we can get into our outage management system during power outages, the faster we can diagnose problems and dispatch appropriate crews. Our Integrated Voice Response System (IVR) uses caller ID to quickly identify you when you call our office—via the phone number you have on your account—and get your outage reported. You can also report outages through our mobile app, myTCEMC, and the recently added outage texting system, TextTCEMC. These new technologies help us get linemen to the problem quickly while also giving you feedback, such as outage maps or updated “status” by text. For all of these outage reporting options to operate correctly, we ask that you update your phone number listed on your account. Visit tri-countyemc.com/report-an-outage.cms to learn more about outage reporting options.

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