Leisure industry electrical services

The closed season is the only window

A holiday park runs on one calendar and everything bends to it. From spring through to the end of the season the site is full, the bars and amusements are open and nobody wants a trench across the main road. Substantial work has to happen in the closed months, when the weather is at its worst and the days are shortest. That is a genuinely awkward window, and it is why park work is best planned in the autumn for the following winter and not booked in a hurry.

In season the job changes shape completely. What a park needs then is somebody who can find a fault on a pitch supply, make it safe and get that pitch back in use without the rest of the row going off with it, because an empty pitch in August is not a maintenance issue, it is lost revenue. The parks between Skegness and Chapel St Leonards sit on our doorstep, which is the practical reason we do this work.

Hook up points and pitch distribution

Pitch supplies have their own way of being done. Each hook up point is an outdoor enclosure with its own overcurrent device and RCD protection for each socket outlet, so one caravan with a damp lead does not take out the whole row. The outlets are industrial connectors and not domestic thirteen amp sockets, the enclosure has to be rated for where it stands, and the supply cable is run and buried deep enough to survive the ground being dug up again.

Above that sits the distribution across the park, which is where older sites tend to struggle. Pitches were added over decades and the sub mains often were not upgraded alongside them. The current pressure is electric vehicles, because a touring pitch was never designed to charge a car overnight. A load assessment before charging is added is not a formality, it is what stops a whole row browning out on a busy bank holiday weekend.

Exposure, enclosures and inspection cycles

The Lincolnshire coast is hard on outdoor electrical equipment. Wind driven rain finds any enclosure that was closed carelessly, and low lying ground means water sits instead of draining away. The remedy is not clever, it is specification and discipline. Bollards and enclosures mounted so water runs off the seal instead of into it, and lids properly closed every single time somebody opens one, will do more for a park than any amount of money spent on the equipment itself.

That exposure is also why inspection intervals on a park are shorter than in a building. Industry guidance puts the maximum period between inspections on a caravan park at a year, and the touring and amusement side gets looked at more often than an office would. A rolling schedule carried out in the closed season keeps certificates in date for the licensing officer and the insurer without a panic in March.