Your Home - Outage Information

Who Do I Call When The Lights Go Out?

When you have a power outage, you want to make sure that someone knows you have no lights and a crew is on the way to fix it.  The last thing that you want to hear when you call is a busy signal or no answer at all.  Well, you can rest assured that you can call our office anytime, day or night, 365 days a year and report a power outage and your message will get to the right person.

We have crews on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week to respond to any power outages that happen either during or after office hours.  So, what happens when your power goes out?

The first thing that North Western Electric Cooperative asks that you do when you have a power outage is to check your fuses or breakers at your residence.  This ensures that the outage was caused by something outside your home and not internal. 

The next step is to call our office number: 419-636-5051 or 800-647-6932 to report the outage.  If it is during our normal office hours, your call will be answered by our Customer Service Representatives in our office.  If the power outage is extensive and our lines are busy, or it is after business hours, your call will automatically get transferred to Cooperative Response Center Inc. (CRC).

CRC is an after-hours contact center with offices in two locations: Austin, Minnesota and Dunlap, Tennessee.  Cooperative Response Center handles all of North Western Electric’s after hour and overflow calls from our members. When you call CRC you will hear the message, “Thank you for calling North Western Electric Cooperative. Our office hours are Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm.”  If they do not receive your caller ID, you will be asked to enter your 10 digit phone number for the account location without power.  You will then be asked to select option # 1 to report an outage or option # 2 for all other non-outage related calls.  If there is an extreme amount of severe weather in the area and hold times are long, you may be asked to report your outage in an automated system.  You may use this automated system or hold for a customer service representative.

When CRC receives your information, they will forward it on to the appropriate person to handle the problem.  Normally this is one of our linemen that is “on call” to handle after hour outage situations.  If you are having a water heater problem, the information is forwarded on to our energy advisor.  In either event, the information will get to the right person and your problem will be taken care of as quickly as we possibly can. 

With CRC handling our calls during after-hours outages, your outage restoral times will be shortened.  While CRC is speaking with you on the phone and getting all of the important information that we need to respond to your outage, North Western’s employees can be focusing all of our efforts into getting the lines back up and your power back on.

Once we receive the call that you are experiencing a power outage, we continue our troubleshooting procedures to determine the location and extent of the outage. Safely restoring your power is our number one priority.