Why does the power go out in Herriman?

Herriman loses power often enough that buyers search for it before they move. Most outages here are weather events on overhead distribution lines. Wind is the usual trigger. Rocky Mountain Power is the utility, and its outage map is the place to look when it happens.

What I get asked is whether it signals something wrong with the area. It generally does not. What it does signal is worth more attention: a short outage is an inconvenience in one house and an expensive problem in another, and the difference is decided by what the house depends on.

Why the west bench loses power more than an older neighborhood

Three things stack up here, and none of them are unique to Herriman.

It is windy. Herriman sits against the Oquirrh foothills, and canyon-driven wind events are a regular feature rather than an occasional one. Wind brings down branches onto overhead lines, and branches onto lines is the most common cause of a neighborhood-scale outage anywhere. Whether Herriman is windy covers how much, because the answer surprises people who toured on a calm day.

The grid is young and still being extended. A town that has grown this fast is constantly adding circuits, tying in new subdivisions and moving load around. Planned interruptions come with that work. They are usually announced, usually short, and usually in the middle of a weekday.

Winter storms do a second kind of damage. Wet, heavy snow loads branches and drops them. What winter is like in Herriman goes into the storm pattern, and it is the one season where an outage stops being an inconvenience, because it can take the furnace with it.

I want to be careful here. I am describing the mechanism, not claiming a cause for any particular outage, and I have not seen a published study attributing Herriman’s outage rate to any one factor. If you want the record for a specific address, Rocky Mountain Power is the only source that actually has it, and they will discuss history for a service address.

The part that matters when you are buying

An outage is a flashlight problem in a standard house on city water with a gas furnace. It is a different problem in these four cases, and all four exist in Herriman.

What the house has	What stops working
A well instead of city water	The pump. No power means no water at all, including toilets
A sump pump in the basement	The sump, exactly when a storm is pushing water at the foundation
A septic system with a lift pump	The pump, with a limited holding window before it backs up
All-electric heating, or a gas furnace with an electric blower	Heat, which in January is a real problem rather than an annoyance

That third column is why I raise this at all. The combination that worries me most is a sump pump plus a storm, because the storm that knocks out the power is the same storm filling the sump. If you are buying a home with a finished basement and a sump, ask whether there is a battery backup or a water-powered backup on it. It is a modest cost new and an expensive retrofit after a flood.

Horse property and larger acreage out toward the west side is where wells and pumps turn up most often. What to know before buying horse property in Herriman covers the broader list for those parcels.

Generators, and the rule nobody reads first

Plenty of Herriman households own a portable generator, and it solves the furnace-and-fridge problem cheaply. Two things to sort out before you count on one.

A portable generator running extension cords is one thing. Anything wired into the house needs a transfer switch and an electrical permit, and that is not optional. Backfeeding a panel through a dryer outlet is how people hurt line workers, and it is also how an insurer declines a claim.

Then read the CC&Rs. Associations frequently regulate where a generator may sit, how long it may run, and the noise it may make, and a standby unit is usually treated as an exterior improvement that needs architectural approval. If you do not know whether the home has an association at all, whether Herriman homes have HOAs is the place to start.

What to actually ask, and who to ask

The sellers are the wrong source for this. They will tell you honestly what they remember, and what people remember about outages is unreliable in both directions.

Better:

Call Rocky Mountain Power about the service address. Ask about outage history and about whether the service is overhead or underground on that street. Underground distribution is meaningfully less exposed to wind and branches.
Ask the neighbors, not the seller. Knock on two doors on either side. People will tell a stranger about last winter in detail.
Look up at the street. Overhead lines and mature trees growing into them are visible from the sidewalk. So is a street with everything buried.
Check what the house depends on. Well or city water, sump or no sump, gas or electric heat, septic or sewer. Four questions, and they determine your whole exposure.

Who should care a lot, and who should not

Care a lot if you work from home on a connection you cannot lose, if the house has a well or a sump, if anyone in the household relies on powered medical equipment, or if you are buying a home with a finished basement in a newer hillside subdivision.

Do not let it drive the decision if you are on city water and sewer with a gas furnace and no basement water history. In that case an outage is a few hours of candles and a cold refrigerator, which is what it is almost everywhere in Utah.

What I would rather not see is a buyer rejecting an otherwise good house over this, or ignoring it entirely in a house where it genuinely matters. Both happen.

What to do next

Before the inspection, answer the four dependency questions above for the specific house. If it has a sump, get the backup priced. If it has a well, ask the inspector to test the pump and ask the seller for the pump’s age in writing.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, I live and work in this part of the valley, and I can tell you which streets are overhead and which are buried from memory on a lot of these subdivisions. Tell me which house you are looking at and I will tell you what it depends on.

Note: This page describes how outages generally happen and what to check. It does not attribute any specific Herriman outage to a specific cause. Rocky Mountain Power holds the actual service history for an address, and that is the source to use.