The pole in my alley holding up the fiber and telephone backbone for the county has an "Osmose 1980" inspection tag on it, and considering that company doesn't even do direct inspection on the east coast and pivoted to selling their pole loading software in the early 2000s, is very promising.
I’ve seen poles as old as the early 1910s still in service. Records were shit so who actually knows. Anyway, the company who owned just set everything with an in-service date of July 1, 1980 when they converted to a new system.
Sounds about right, I think the power companies expect their joint use poles to be analyzed and tested by the utility companies, but from experience, the utility company PLAs are not focused on accuracy, but on showing a report of a passing pole by fudging numbers.
Sometimes they literally just copy and paste the same PLA file over and over just changing the pole name and maybe attachment height.
They get mad at me when I actually do them correctly and model whole runs of poles using imagery and context to try and show which poles are actually in need of remediation, replacement, or removal.
Sounds fucking obnoxious but super cool if you were actually encouraged to do a god job
I learned the other day about the existence of the fungicides they sometimes use and the little metal tags. So much goes (or should go, perhaps) into maintenance, it’s crazy
Oh yeah, it's always cheaper to maintain old stock than replace it, but it's also cheaper to replace failing stock than replace failed stock.
Pole analysis is one of those jobs that used to really suck because you had to calculate all the statics by hand for each pole, but with software designed for it now you can just slap some point data in there and click on calibrated images to build out the static system. Makes it easy to change things and test out multiple load conditions.
Kinda makes me sad that not many industry people use the software the way it's meant to be used and instead just create reports meant to go directly into archives.
Hey, as someone that works for a utility, only like 40% of our assets are more than 30 years old lmao
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The pole in my alley holding up the fiber and telephone backbone for the county has an "Osmose 1980" inspection tag on it, and considering that company doesn't even do direct inspection on the east coast and pivoted to selling their pole loading software in the early 2000s, is very promising.
I’ve seen poles as old as the early 1910s still in service. Records were shit so who actually knows. Anyway, the company who owned just set everything with an in-service date of July 1, 1980 when they converted to a new system.
Sounds about right, I think the power companies expect their joint use poles to be analyzed and tested by the utility companies, but from experience, the utility company PLAs are not focused on accuracy, but on showing a report of a passing pole by fudging numbers.
Sometimes they literally just copy and paste the same PLA file over and over just changing the pole name and maybe attachment height.
They get mad at me when I actually do them correctly and model whole runs of poles using imagery and context to try and show which poles are actually in need of remediation, replacement, or removal.
Sounds fucking obnoxious but super cool if you were actually encouraged to do a god job
I learned the other day about the existence of the fungicides they sometimes use and the little metal tags. So much goes (or should go, perhaps) into maintenance, it’s crazy
Oh yeah, it's always cheaper to maintain old stock than replace it, but it's also cheaper to replace failing stock than replace failed stock.
Pole analysis is one of those jobs that used to really suck because you had to calculate all the statics by hand for each pole, but with software designed for it now you can just slap some point data in there and click on calibrated images to build out the static system. Makes it easy to change things and test out multiple load conditions.
Kinda makes me sad that not many industry people use the software the way it's meant to be used and instead just create reports meant to go directly into archives.