Frequently asked questions

Planned shutdowns are published in advance and usually cover a specific street list or substation for a fixed window (see Today/Tomorrow). If you had no notice and it's just your area affected, it's almost certainly a fault — report it rather than waiting.

The statewide TNPDCL/TANGEDCO helpline is 1912, available 24x7. The call centre 94987 94987 and WhatsApp 94458 50811 also work. Keep your consumer number ready.

Most published maintenance windows run a few hours, commonly in the morning on a weekday. Duration depends on the scale of the work — a single transformer swap is quicker than re-stringing a stretch of line.

This can happen when a fault trips a protective device, gets reset remotely, and trips again because the underlying fault (a fallen branch, a short) hasn't actually cleared. Report it — repeated tripping is worth a line crew visit even if power keeps returning briefly.

TANGEDCO (Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation) was restructured in 2024. Its distribution operations now sit under TNPDCL (Tamil Nadu Power Distribution Corporation Limited), generation under TNPGCL, and renewables under TNGECL. TNPDCL is the entity that now handles the distribution-side matters this site covers, though "TANGEDCO" and "TNEB" are still widely used names for it.

TNPDCL has published service standards with compensation for delayed restoration in some cases. If a fault isn't resolved within the committed time, you can escalate to the Consumer Grievance Redressal Forum (CGRF). Details are on tnpdcl.org.

Two things stack up at once. Domestic AC load climbs hard through April–June, and agricultural pump sets in the same feeder area are often running longer hours because of low rainfall. A distribution transformer sized for a normal load starts tripping on overload well before it fails outright — which is why the same transformer that's fine in December struggles in May. Planned load-balancing shutdowns tend to bunch up in this window for exactly that reason.

A feeder is the line running out from a substation that a group of streets shares. Which streets are on which feeder isn't obvious from the road — it depends on how the network was built, not on how close two streets are to each other. So two streets a hundred metres apart can be on completely different feeders with completely different outage histories. If you want to know your specific feeder, your area TNPDCL section office can tell you; it's not published anywhere centrally.

Yes, in practice. Agricultural feeders often run on a separate supply schedule tied to subsidised farm power hours, which is a different system from the maintenance shutdowns this site tracks. Industrial estates (SIPCOT areas, for instance) are usually on their own dedicated feeders precisely so a fault or maintenance window in a nearby residential area doesn't take down a factory line, and vice versa.

Unfortunately, yes, especially after storms. An initial estimate is usually based on the visible damage a crew can see on arrival. If they find a second break further down the line, or the pole itself needs replacing rather than just the wire, that adds hours a phone estimate couldn't have accounted for. It's frustrating, but a moving estimate after a storm is more often genuine new information than a runaround.

Depends entirely on how often your specific area gets hit and for how long. If you're seeing frequent multi-hour planned cuts (check your district page for the pattern), even a basic inverter covering lights, fans and a router pays for itself in convenience fairly fast. If your area rarely appears on the shutdown list, it's harder to justify. The inverter sizing calculator gives you a rough VA and battery figure to start pricing against.

Because it's exactly that — a list someone maintains by hand, not a direct feed from TNPDCL's internal systems. It can lag, and unplanned faults obviously won't appear until someone adds them. Treat it as a starting point, not the final word — tnpdcl.org and your local section office are the authoritative source.