Electricians and solar installers in Ingoldmells

Bollards, seals and worn socket outlets

Bollards take the punishment on a site like this. Lids get broken, hinges seize, seals perish under ultraviolet, someone reverses a caravan into one, and the ground around it is dug up twice a season. A pitch that tested clear in March can be failing by July, and it is almost never the cable in the ground that has given up. It is the box at the end of it.

Once water has been inside an enclosure it tends to get in again, so replacing a unit usually beats patching it. The other recurring fault is the socket outlet itself, worn by hundreds of connections a year from leads of every age and condition. Both are cheap to put right in November and expensive to deal with on a Saturday in August.

Testing a park before the season opens

A pre season test on a park is not the same job as testing a building. The runs are long and buried, so earth fault loop impedance and voltage drop at the furthest bollard on a row matter far more than they would indoors, and an RCD that operates correctly at the board tells you nothing about the one sitting out in the field. Every socket outlet needs its own protection proved.

That is why the autumn walk round is worth doing properly. Going round with the site manager once the last vans have gone, listing what failed during the season and what is close to it, turns next July's problem into this January's schedule. Testing a representative run of pitches at the same time gives you the evidence to decide what gets replaced and what has another season left in it.

Site records that make a fault quick to find

Good documentation is the cheapest resilience a park can have. Clear board schedules, labelled pitch circuits and a current inspection report mean nobody is tracing an unmarked cable across a dark field in August working out which bollard is fed from where. On a site that has grown in phases over several decades, that paperwork is often the piece that is missing rather than anything in the wiring itself.

So it gets left behind on whatever the work was, a distribution upgrade or a single bollard. Circuits marked up, the board schedule brought up to date, and test results handed over in a form the site manager and an insurer can both read without ringing anyone to ask what it means.

EV charge points on a holiday park

Guests turn up in electric cars now and parks around Ingoldmells are being asked to provide somewhere to plug in. It is rarely as simple as fixing a unit to a wall. The incoming supply was sized around pitch loads and an amenity block, so adding several charge points means looking honestly at the capacity that is genuinely spare, at load management, and at whether the network operator needs an application before anything is ordered.

Done properly it becomes something a park can meter and recover rather than a cost it absorbs. Done badly it is the reason the site trips on a busy Saturday. For a lot of parks here the sensible route is fewer units with load management behind them than more units without.