Every two years we bring a company in to test our hotsticks. This is a requirement by OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration). Hotsticks are used to when we work on energized powerlines and various electrical equipment. If a hotstick isn’t properly cared for and gets damaged, the electricity could travel down the hotstick and electrocute the Lineman using it.
There is a hotstick or attachment for everything that needs to be done when working on the electrical grid. Some have interchangeable attachments, some extend out to 45 feet, some have cutters and crimpers, and some you can even put sockets on to tighten bolts. Maybe one day I will go through a few of them show you tell you all what they are used for, but today we are going to talk about how they are tested.
Hotsticks are made from a foam filled fiberglass with a protective coating on the outside. If the coating gets damaged enough it can cause the stick to fail. The guy doing the testing visually inspects the hotsticks, wipes them down, and makes sure they work properly. Then he begins the dielectric testing on this rack.
The sticks are laid in the rack and a little chain is wrapped around them every foot. Each stick is tested at 75,000 volts per foot for a time period of 3 minutes. Then he gets the hotsticks wet and tests them at 75,000 volts for 1 minute.
4 sticks can be tested at one time. Once they are all in place in the chains wrapped around them, he cranks up the voltage on his dielectric testing machine. The buzzing/crackling sound is pretty loud during the testing.
It doesn’t happen often but when a hotstick fails the test, a super loud POP can be heard echoing through the shop. If a stick fails it is set aside, tagged, and then taken out of service and sent off to get repaired. After the repairs are made it gets tested again to ensure the repairs fixed the problem.
It took this guy 3 days to test all of the hotsticks we have. I would say there are close to 150 in total, probably more. Our tool room is loaded with a bunch of spare hotsticks and each of the 3 crews carry around 20 in total amongst their trucks. Our bigger bucket trucks carry 10 or more since those are the ones we use when doing bigger hotstick jobs. Out of all those hotsticks that got tested we only had 8 fail. I would say that is a pretty good percentage, wouldn’t you.
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