Storm Damage and Your Meter Mast

Where Nova Scotia Power’s responsibility ends and yours begins

At the meter. Nova Scotia Power owns the supply up to and including the meter itself. The meter mast, which is the tube the service line attaches to, the service entrance cable, the panel and everything downstream belong to the property owner.

That line is the whole reason storm damage here works the way it does. When the wind takes a branch through the service line, whether it is their repair or yours depends entirely on which side of the meter it happened. It is also why reporting it as a simple outage can leave you waiting for a crew that, when it arrives, cannot fix the thing that is broken.

What to look at before you call anyone

Look at the mast. It is the vertical pipe where the overhead line meets your house, usually at the roofline or up the side wall. Nova Scotia Power’s own guidance is to check whether it has pulled away from the house, and whether it is bent or broken. If it has, you need a certified electrician, and the reconnection will not happen without one.

Do not touch it, do not try to straighten it, and do not assume it is dead because the lights are off. Look from the ground and phone.

The three steps, in order

The order matters, because doing them in a different one just means waiting twice.

1. Call Nova Scotia Power on 1-877-428-6004 and report the damage. They send a line crew to disconnect the service so it is safe for anyone to work on. This is the step people skip, and skipping it means the electrician arrives to a live service and cannot start.

2. Find a certified electrician. Nova Scotia Power will help contact one if you do not have one, and they publish a list of participating contractors by county.

3. The electrician repairs the mast and then calls Nova Scotia Power to request the inspection and the reconnection. You do not book the reconnection yourself; it follows the inspection, and the inspection follows the repair.

What this looks like from the inside of the house

Half the house dark, or everything dark while the street is lit. If you have lost one of the two legs feeding the panel, some circuits work and some do not, which is confusing enough that people start testing breakers and suspecting the panel.

If the street has power and you do not, look outside before you look in the basement. A panel that is fine will look exactly like a panel that is fine, and the twenty minutes spent in front of it is twenty minutes not spent getting the service reported.

After the power is back

Two things are worth doing once the immediate problem is solved, and both get forgotten the moment the lights come on.

Have the rest of the service looked at. A mast that has been pulled on hard enough to bend has also pulled on the cable and the connections behind it, and those do not always fail immediately. If the house is also on an older service or a fuse panel, this is the moment that decision usually gets made anyway.

Think about the next one. In parts of HRM where the power goes out most, a Generlink or generator hookup is the difference between an inconvenience and a freezer full of food. It is a much easier conversation in October than during the third day of an outage.

One thing we are not

We are an electrical contractor, not your insurer and not Nova Scotia Power. Whether storm damage to your mast is covered, and what your deductible does to that, is a question for the company that wrote your policy. What we can tell you is what the repair involves and how quickly it can happen.