Three thousand homes were without power for up to an hour after a piece of equipment malfunctioned yesterday.

Belco said the outage — which happened at 2.30 p.m. in Somerset — was caused while routine maintenance work was being carried out on an engine.

As workers restored it to power, the equipment malfunctioned and a breaker closed. Stress on that engine caused the load to increase on another, and two more engines cascaded.

Three circuits then went out and another three were manually closed by operators at Belco operations centre to reduce the load on the system.

All the affected engines were back in service within an hour, a spokeswoman said last night.

Last night, Bermuda CableVision reported that some of its line-up was affected by the Belco outage.

CableVision also suffered a short outage between 7.20 and 7.35 p.m. when an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) failed during maintenance. UPS provides continuous supply of electrical power to equipment in an emergency.

CableVision general manager Terry Roberson apologised for any inconvenience.