Lighting Installation in Pownal, Maine

Pownal Homes and What They Need

Pownal is a small farming town with an old housing stock. Census estimates put the median build year at 1971, and roughly 31 percent of its approximately 740 homes were built before 1940, a high share for Cumberland County. Nearly nine in ten are detached single-family houses, and nine in ten households own their home. The pattern is older farmhouses strung along rural roads, with newer houses set into wooded lots, many around Bradbury Mountain State Park. Very few homes are seasonal. Old farmhouses bring their own jobs: fieldstone or rubble foundations, ells and barns added in stages, and heating plants that have been swapped several times over. Where radiators remain, servicing or replacing an older boiler is often the first decision a new Pownal owner faces.

Power, Storms and Wiring in Pownal

Central Maine Power serves Pownal over long rural lines through heavy woods, the kind of distribution that goes down first in ice and wind. The 1998 ice storm and the October 2017 nor'easter, which cut power to more than 400,000 Maine customers with some outages lasting over a week, hit wooded inland towns hard. With no town water to fall back on, an outage here also stops the well pump, so the house loses water along with heat and lights. Pownal also has a high work-from-home rate, about a quarter of workers, so a dead circuit or a cold office is lost work as well. For many households, a standby generator wired to the well pump and boiler is the practical answer.

Getting to Know Pownal