Distribution network audits fail at the data capture stage, not at the analysis stage. The data that field crews bring back from a pole survey is only as good as the structure they use to capture it, and most crews are working with handwritten tally sheets that lose crucial distinctions between conductor types, customer categories, and pole conditions by the time they reach the office.
What a Degraded Pole Record Actually Costs
A tilted pole that gets logged as "noted" rather than "Tilted" with a GPS coordinate is a liability that drifts. It appears in no filterable report. It can't be sorted against other tilted poles in the same feeder section. It doesn't trigger maintenance priority scoring. It just sits in someone's field notebook until the pole fails or a crew revisits the street and finds it again.
The pole conditions field here runs four options: Broken, Decayed, Tilted, Cracked. These are mutually non-exclusive via multichoice — a pole can be both Decayed and Tilted, which is a different remediation priority than either condition alone. The GPS location pin ties each record to a precise coordinate rather than an address approximation, which matters in areas where street addressing is inconsistent or informal.
The conductor multichoice covers the full range of distribution-standard specifications used in EEU networks: AAC 25 and 50 for bare aluminium, Cu 16 and 25 for copper, and ABC 16, 25, 50, and 95 for aerial bundled cable. Capturing conductor type per pole is the foundation of a load capacity assessment — you can't calculate maximum ampacity for a section of the feeder without knowing what conductor is actually strung between poles, and that data is notoriously absent from legacy network maps.
Three Customer Categories That Tell Different Stories
The template splits customer counts across three distinct fields: domestic customers, commercial customers, and power customers. The calculated field "no. of sp customer/pole" adds domestic and commercial. "No. of 3ph customers" mirrors the power customer field directly. "Total cust./pole" then aggregates all three.
This separation is not administrative tidiness — it's an engineering distinction. A pole serving fifteen domestic customers on single-phase at 5A per service represents a fundamentally different loading profile than one serving two 3Ph 30/60A commercial accounts. The amperage multichoice captures the service specification: 3Ph 15/30A, 3Ph 30/60A, 3Ph 5A, AR 100/5A through AR 300/5A, and AR 50/90A. An AR 200/5A metered service at a hotel on a pole also carrying eight domestic drop connections is a pole that deserves priority inspection before the next rainy season.
The service type fields — shops, electric shops, garages, injera bakeries for small commercial; hotels, workshops, printing services, offices for larger power accounts — give the customer taxonomy real-world specificity. When planning load balancing or planning a new DT, knowing that a specific pole section feeds four injera bakeries and a welding workshop is more useful than knowing it feeds six "commercial" accounts.
What the Data Looks Like After a Full Feeder Survey
The DT 315kva subheader field anchors the downstream hierarchy — records are grouped under their distribution transformer reference, which gives you feeder-level aggregation. With a few hundred pole records entered across a feeder section, you can filter for all poles on 3Ph with Broken or Decayed condition, sorted by customer count. That's your emergency maintenance priority list. You can filter for all ABC 95 conductor poles to identify your highest-capacity backbone sections. You can pull every pole where total customer count exceeds a threshold to identify potential overload points for the next capacity planning cycle.
The contract number field connects the pole record back to the administrative system — if a specific customer's connection is disputed or needs verification, the contract number on the pole record ties the physical infrastructure to the billing database without requiring a separate lookup.