07 January 2007
National Grid Offers Online Outage Check
The National Grid, which provides US customers in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire with power is alerting users of the ability to check for outages for its NY customers. These customers can now go online and get information about power outages that affect their homes and communities.
From www.nationalgridus.com/stormcentral, customers can check power outages or report an outage. Estimated time of restoration is also given for outages as well as the number of customers who are affected by the outage. Because of privacy concerns, customers are required to enter their account or telephone number along with the last four digits of the SSN of the account holder in order to get address specific information. To get information about a county including the number of people affected nothing is needed though.
One note to remember, at the time of writing this, the site did not allow the Opera browser to use the site. One option for Opera users is to right click the site and after clicking 'site preferences' will be given a screen with several tabs across the top. If you click on the 'Network' tab the bottom of the window has a drop-down list titled 'Browser identification'. If you mask your Opera browser as Firefox or IE, it will work with no difficulties. Without doing this, going to the home page of the national grid gives you a warning that the site only supports IE and Netscape. The other option is from this warning page, you are still able to go to the home page by clicking home in the right top corner of the site. From there though there is no link to the storm central page unlike with other browsers and users must change the browser identification. Going directly to the storm central page without doing this will give an error that the page could not be found.
If you are an Opera user in the service area who wants to use the service without having to go through the extra hassle of changing the browser's identification, you might try contacting the national grid to see why it is not supported and if it will be. You might also point out that it does work perfectly well with Opera 9 so their isn't an issue, but you just would prefer not to have to mask your browser.
From www.nationalgridus.com/stormcentral, customers can check power outages or report an outage. Estimated time of restoration is also given for outages as well as the number of customers who are affected by the outage. Because of privacy concerns, customers are required to enter their account or telephone number along with the last four digits of the SSN of the account holder in order to get address specific information. To get information about a county including the number of people affected nothing is needed though.
One note to remember, at the time of writing this, the site did not allow the Opera browser to use the site. One option for Opera users is to right click the site and after clicking 'site preferences' will be given a screen with several tabs across the top. If you click on the 'Network' tab the bottom of the window has a drop-down list titled 'Browser identification'. If you mask your Opera browser as Firefox or IE, it will work with no difficulties. Without doing this, going to the home page of the national grid gives you a warning that the site only supports IE and Netscape. The other option is from this warning page, you are still able to go to the home page by clicking home in the right top corner of the site. From there though there is no link to the storm central page unlike with other browsers and users must change the browser identification. Going directly to the storm central page without doing this will give an error that the page could not be found.
If you are an Opera user in the service area who wants to use the service without having to go through the extra hassle of changing the browser's identification, you might try contacting the national grid to see why it is not supported and if it will be. You might also point out that it does work perfectly well with Opera 9 so their isn't an issue, but you just would prefer not to have to mask your browser.
