Anyone else dealing with a 12 kV feeder that clears on first shot, then locks out on the second with no smoke or smell on patrol? F-3 dumped twice at 02:10 with 400 A on the OCR, we found a hairline crack on a 200 A S&C cutout at pole 67 with the FLIR and got the block back in 28 minutes — what tools or tricks are you using to speed night patrols and catch these ghost faults?
But when it’s a ‘second-shot’ ghost, I lean on a handheld ultrasonic/UV corona camera more than FLIR — it’ll flag tracking on cracked cutouts and tie-top insulators that look cool on IR, though wind can make it chatty; you catching any corona around the elbows near 67?
I keep a cheap AM radio in the truck — tune it off-station, volume up, and walk/drive the feeder; the “sizzle” spikes right under a cracked cutout or dirty tie, a poor-man’s PD detector. @sophia_mar85’s UV is great, but the AM trick is faster when you’re leapfrogging laterals at 2 a.m. If it’s stubborn, I’ll set the recloser to one-shot for a bit and roll immediately to catch the warm/ozone trail while it’s fresh.
We deploy a small thermal drone post-trip and scan topside jumpers/arresters — way faster than foot FLIR. You flying 02:10, @ametayl?
I’ve had better luck nailing these by clamping arrester grounds for leakage in the suspect span — at night we walk with a mA clamp and anything creeping past about 2–3 mA under load gets swapped; last one was a 9 mA MOV on a lateral that only tripped on the second shot. Lining that up with OCR timestamps has cut our patrols to about 20 minutes. You carrying a milliamp clamp, @ametayl?