Welcome to Plug in 2 engineering

Transcript

I'm craft apprentice Overhead Linesperson. That means I carry out construction, maintenance and repair of overhead line networks. Basically they will transport your electricity into your house.

I'm about to go up the pole to carry out some maintenance work, so we have to put on some safety gear or else we're going to fall. Basically this is the harness that Linespeople wear. We have a thing called a pole chocker, It actually chokes around the pole so you don't fall, ok. These are your climbers - these just fasten on to your feet and you see the spike there. That just digs into the pole so you can just climb up.

I wanted to work with electricity and I thought that overhead lines was going to be a good challenge for me. You do a four-year apprenticeship in which time you get your City and Guilds and NVQ.

There is quite a lot of training involved, quite a lot of working away from home but, you know, you're working with other apprentices so you don't really mind - it's really good. You need team work, obviously - you're working in a team. You need good communication skills. You need to have a head for heights or else you won't get up the pole and do the work. You need to be very hands on person or else you know, you won't get on in the job.

You do need science and maths particularly in maths as overhead lines as you need to work out tensions via cables, you need to work out ohm's law and stuff like that. Many people think that I won't need these, I'll learn them once I'm at school and I won't need them anymore - but if you come into a job like this you really do need them.

There is a lot of health and safety involved with the job, obviously - you're working with electricity and you need to have all the relevant health and safety and personal protective equipment to help the job run smoothly and safely. I've learnt how to actually climb up the pole, it's quite important when you're a Linesperson, how to put tyres on top of an insulator like this, and things like that. Just basic skills really in the first couple of months, but as the course progresses on you get to do more hands on things and get to play with bigger things. The best thing about being a Linesperson is you are out and about, you're not stuck behind a desk all day, you're not doing the same old job day in day out, it's a very varied career.

After the electricity is generated at the power stations, the voltage is stepped up to actually push it through the overhead lines, to get it run the country, the overhead lines they'll feed substations and eventually substations will step down the electricity for 11 Kv down to 230 volts which is what homes and businesses run on. Maintenance needs to be carried out on the overhead lines. That's where the Linesperson comes in especially in fault situations.

A Linesperson's job is very important because if the electricity goes off at stupid o'clock in the morning it's usually the Linespeople who get sent out to repair it and get your electricity back online so it is quite rewarding to think that millions of people are relying on you to get their electricity back online if it goes out. So yeah it's very good, I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far.