ANDOVER householders have had intermittent power cuts for more than a month.

Since the beginning of the year, up to 100 residents living off Winchester Road have had at least 11 power cuts.

They have mainly occurred between 7pm and 8pm, every third day, and last for several hours.

Neil Cairns, who has lived in Anton Road for the past 20 years without any problems with power prior to this, last reported a power cut to Southern and Scottish Electricity on Friday.

He said: “It usually happens between 7pm to 8pm when everyone comes in for tea.

Everyone has half-cooked food in the oven, and then you have to go out for takeaways – it’s costing us real money for spoilt food.

“In the evening people are very frustrated and furious that it’s going on but if someone would just talk to us, that would go a long, long way”

Mr Cairns and his wife have had to throw away four lots of food as a result of a power cut halfway through cooking, and have had to resort to countless takeaways since the problems began.

He also claims that SSE charges 14p a minute for phone calls to its helpline to report a power cut.

Mr Cairns added: “When it has gone on for ages, people are furious.

“If somebody from SSE would at least tell us that they are aware of it and they have a plan, but you just feel helpless as you can’t get anybody to tell you what’s happening.”

A SSE spokeswoman said that the problem was fixed over the past few days.

She said: “We are aware that they have had quite a large number of faults recently and we are very apologetic.

“We are talking directly to customers that have been affected – we have about 100 people affected by this fault in the network.

“It looks like we have had a little bit of work to do which we have done and we are confident we have an engineering fix.”