Service Mast and Weatherhead Damage: Who Repairs What

A storm comes through, a limb comes down, and the pipe running up the side of your house is now leaning away from the wall with the wires from the pole still attached to it. Or the meter can is hanging off the siding. You call CPS Energy, they come out, and they de-energize the service and leave. The house stays dark, and nobody has explained why the power company came to your house and did not fix your power.

The answer is a boundary called the Point of Delivery, and once you understand where it sits, everything about the sequence makes sense.

Where the boundary is

CPS Energy's customer terms and conditions define two things that matter here. The Point of Delivery is, in general, the physical point where the electric energy first leaves the utility's Service Installation and enters the Customer's Installation. The Customer's Installation is, in general, all the wiring, devices, apparatus, and equipment of any kind on the customer's side of that point.

Then the terms state it plainly: the customer assumes all responsibility on the customer's side of the Point of Delivery, including the Customer's Installation.

So on a typical overhead residential service, the wires running from the pole to your house are the utility's. The pipe they land on, the fitting at the top of it, the conductors running down inside it, the enclosure the meter sits in, and every wire past that are yours.

The pieces, in the order the power travels

• The service drop is the span of conductors from the utility pole to your house. Utility side.
• The point of attachment is where that span lands, usually a bolt through your mast or wall. The hardware and the structure it is bolted to are yours.
• The weatherhead is the fitting at the top of the mast that lets your conductors out while keeping water from running down inside. Yours.
• The service mast is the pipe itself, running from the weatherhead down the wall. Yours.
• The service entrance conductors run from the weatherhead down to the meter. Yours.
• The meter loop is the enclosure and assembly the meter sits in. Yours.
• The meter is furnished, installed, and owned by CPS Energy. Theirs.
• Everything from the meter into the house, including the panel, is yours.

The meter is the odd one out, and it is worth understanding why. CPS Energy's terms state that the utility furnishes, installs, and owns the meter, while the customer provides an appropriate location for it, including an adequate meter loop, as part of the Customer's Installation. Their instrument, your housing, and your obligation to keep that location accessible to them.

Why they will not just reconnect it

This is the part that frustrates people at the worst possible moment, and it is not discretionary on the utility's end. CPS Energy's terms give them the right, though not the duty, to inspect a customer's installation at any time and to refuse to commence or continue service whenever they do not consider that installation to be safe or in good operating condition.

A mast that has been pulled sideways, a meter can hanging off a wall, or service entrance conductors with damaged insulation is not a safe installation. Energizing it would put current into damaged equipment attached to a house with people in it. So the utility disconnects, and the service does not come back until your side is rebuilt.

The same logic runs through their new construction process, which is a useful place to see the boundary drawn in advance rather than after a storm. Their residential service checklist lists the conditions the customer has to meet before CPS Energy will start construction, and among them are that the meter loop is built and completed, that permits are released, and that inspections are approved. The customer builds their side, the city inspects it, and then the utility connects to it. Storm repair follows the same order.

What the repair actually involves

More than it looks like from the driveway, because a mast that has been pulled has usually stressed more than the visible bend.

We evaluate the mast and its attachment, the weatherhead, the condition of the service entrance conductors inside it, the meter enclosure and its mounting, and the grounding. Damaged conductors get replaced rather than straightened. The mast gets rebuilt to the required clearances and secured properly rather than patched back to where it was. If the meter can took the impact, it gets replaced.

The work is permitted and inspected, and it is coordinated with CPS Energy on both ends, the disconnect to work safely and the reconnection when it is done. That coordination is part of the job, and it is one of the reasons this is not a repair to hand to a handyman.

This is service entrance work, which sits alongside a panel upgrade in scope and often happens together with one, since a mast failure on a fifty year old service frequently reveals a panel that was already at the end of its life. If the damage is limited, it is straightforward electrical repair.

What to do the day it happens

• Stay away from the service and anything touching it, including fences and gutters near a downed line. Treat every conductor as live.
• Report the outage and the damage to CPS Energy so they can de-energize it safely.
• Photograph the damage from a safe distance, before repairs, for your insurance claim.
• Call a licensed electrician for the repair. This one is genuinely urgent, because your reconnection cannot start until your side is finished.
• Ask your insurer about coverage. Storm damage to your service equipment is sudden accidental damage, which is a different category from the aging-equipment maintenance carriers decline to fund.

That last point is worth pressing on. A mast torn off by a falling limb is exactly the kind of loss homeowners insurance exists for, unlike the panel replacements that get declined as maintenance.

The distinction between the two is worth understanding before you call your carrier, and we laid it out in what it means when your insurer flags your wiring. If part of the house has power and part does not, that is a different problem with a different cause, covered in half your house lost power.

A dark house in August is not a wait-until-Monday situation. Service entrance damage is on our emergency list, and we work it across the metro, from Olmos Park and Windcrest to Leon Valley. Call and we will get your side rebuilt so the utility can put you back on.