No issues here in West Wales, touch wood our supply is very stable. In a situation like that, I'd definitely be looking at a battery solution with full home backup such as the Powerwall 3.

Where this would be concerning for me is that my heat pump comes back online after a power outage in the OFF position, so if I'm away on holiday over winter and the power goes out (even for a short time), the heating is then off until I return home and can manually switch it back on again. It would be nice if the controller had the facility to select the same operational status as before the power went off, but it can't.

@old_scientist No outages in our part of the Thames Valley but, we are fortunate in having our battery backup should it be necessary. @mars, have you considered that the cuts may not have been due to over-demand but possible failures due to contractors biting through cables and (as with our 1930’s cables), tired old cables just failing? The latter was the cause of a 12 hour loss of power in our road during Covid 19. Yhe cabling in our road is now partially 1930’s with lots of little 2000’s patch-ups! Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @old_scientist

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Where this would be concerning for me is that my heat pump comes back online after a power outage in the OFF position, so if I'm away on holiday over winter and the power goes out (even for a short time), the heating is then off until I return home and can manually switch it back on again. It would be nice if the controller had the facility to select the same operational status as before the power went off, but it can't.

Really - thats terrible.  If it cant be changed in the UI its a very good argument not to buy a Samsung Gen 6 heat pump!

@jamespa our Vaillant control box, (wired into domestic power and hence on a domestic circuit trip) didn’t go back on automatically when we reset the trip. It needed a physical  reset button press by human in front of it. So after a power cut it wouldn’t go back on either? You might want to check the operation of yours. The outside unit is on its own separate wiring with a big safety on off obviously. We’re going to get the control unit wired into the same line as the outside unit so if it goes it’s together.

Our battery has a manual changeover to its EPS in the event of a power cut because the output current isn’t enough for the whole house. So if we’re away power stays off.

We've had 2 power cuts in 15 years here in Hampshire. A domestic trip goes about once a year and infuriatingly we’ve not been able to to identify what triggers them, despite some considerable investigations. With lighting it’s easy, a bulb going takes the trip out.

I checked mine and it came back on.  Took about 10s of 'loading' then doing it's job.  Its not the first time I've done this and it never occurred to me that it wouldn't come back up.

Was the reset button you pressed on the controller itself or elsewhere?

I struggle to believe anyone designs a heating controller that doesn't come back to it's previous settings after a power failure.  This would be just mad.  So long as it receives power it should work.  Perhaps there is a setting somewhere?

Yep, Kent here, we get blips regularly, depending on which small town or village your are in it can be up to 6 short (2hrs) per year and 10 mini blips so 2 seconds a year. Perhaps we are a windy county or poor power grid on old transformers and poles. I do not remember having any power out for longer than 2hrs though in the last 5 years.

Living in rural but glorious NE Scotland then yes, power outages are a fact of life. Much less frequent than in past years but still a thing. Its not uncommon for a tractor or combine to get a little to close to a pole and the resulting ding puts the line off. It is usually rectified quickly but some recent outages were in the 4/5 hour bracket. The Hydro Board, sorry I must get used to calling them SSE nowadays,  have been quite active in the past few years removing trees near lines and upgrading the 11kV system.  We are scheduled to be off for 6 hours soon to re-pole and re-line the local loop.   My generator will be ready for only it's second outing this winter! 

The Ecodan HP always comes back to operation okay. It does take a while to go through some sort of start up routine after power is restored before normal operation is observed.

Which DNO are you with in SE England, @ashp-bobba  ?

It could be SSE or UKPN.

In Kent, the family referred to by @editor will be supplied by UKPN.

They have a Power Cuts list which is publicly available.
Click on an entry and it opens a map showing details:

SSEN's system has an active map called PowerTrack.
At the time of writing I can see three outages, of which one is 'planned maintenance'.

Click on a pin to see the affected area.

An outage is either LV (Low Voltage) which means 'below 1000v'
or HV, which is between 1kv to 132kV.

Above that it's on the Transmission Grid, operated by NGET in England & Wales, and referred to as EHV.

I have a particular interest in faults on the 11kV grid level.

The great majority of the electricity grid cabling is at 11kV, and supplies our local substations.
That's 230,000 ground-mounted, and 320,000 pole-mounted transformers.

NESO and NGET's current policy is to 'invest' in major upgrades of the network at 132kV and above.
That's where National Grid Group has announced £30bn to £45bn of infrastructure upgrades, depending on which of John Pettigrew's speeches is being reported.

They will recover that by increasing the TToU charges over the following years,
which means it's really our investment, not theirs.

However, the 11kV level is so extensive that it's beyond the wealth of the country to pay for its upgrade.
Think - 'HS2 on steroids' and you'll get the idea.

There are technical solutions available to avoid the need for reinforcement at the 11kV level.
But such strategies are 'invisible' to Ofgem because they interpret their regulatory role as controls on the costs and profits of licensed providers.

Anything that can be achieved without needing to make a profit falls outside their remit! 😤 

From the Outage List, I see that UKPN has announced 30 power-cuts in the past 24 hours.
Most remain unresolved.

That seems high for a day with no obvious curtailments due to poor weather.

By way of comparison, here's the NGED Power Cut map for all four of its DNO regions.

@transparent We are UKPN

That's unfortunate @ashp-bobba 

The rest of us are busy sending all our electricity down to your end of the UK

and the network charges levied by UKPN are the lowest in the country and have been so for years.

I wonder if UKPN have kept the Daily Standing Charge so low that they've been unable to undertake the level of maintenance which other DNOs have achieved.

I'd suggest you monitor the UKPN Power Cuts List over the next three or four days.

And compare with the dynamic PowerTrack map by SSEN.
As PowerTrack doesn't show incidents which have been resolved, you'll need to check it every few hours.

You can then write to UKPN, present your scratch poll, and ask why outages are higher in your region.

Go to their Engagement with Stakeholders page.
There's a Feedback link at the bottom/right of the page.

Be prepared for unexpected responses.

Perhaps UKPN is receiving fewer useful communications from the general public than other DNOs.

Is it possible that consumers in rural areas of Wales and the West Country are phoning in when they see a damaged cable,
but that those in the South East ignore such occurrences.

So the first that UKPN know about it is when the power actually fails.