Sanford Bowling Alley set to reopen
The owners of Airport Lanes on East Airport Boulevard are preparing to reopen Monday at Noon.
The bowling alley has been closed since Nov. 1, 2023 due to power dips and surges.
The bowling alley owners said the electrical issue cost them $166,000 to repair and replace equipment that was damaged by the issue since August.
After Channel 9 contacted Florida Power & Light in December, the two sides got together to find the problem, but the issue persisted with no resolution.
▶ WATCH CHANNEL 9 EYEWITNESS NEWS
“Miller Electric came up with a solution to put in these big surge protectors that go inside our main panels and every panel in the building to protect us from FPL surges ups and downs,” said Jennifer Halpern, the Chief Financial Officer for Aloma Bowling Centers. The cost for the surge protectors was $40,000 out of pocket, but a cost Halpern said was worth every penny to spare the bowling alley from anymore losses. “Our bowlers have stood by us. They’re excited, waiting for the league to start again. It works, so we’re excited to get open on Monday. It’s a holiday so hopefully kids are out of school come by and try out the new the new games.”
Before the power surge issue Airport Lanes ordered new scoring machines complete with new games and activities.
“We wanted to add that extra, where they can play Angry Birds and do Rival Rumbles against other people on other lanes and it gives for a little more fun experience,” said Halpern. Today workers were busy cleaning and testing out the equipment to make sure everything’s ready for Monday. “we’re just excited, just to get everyone back in. Get the staff back to work”.
An FPL spokesperson told Channel 9 today in a statement, “We are in regular communication with the customer and remain committed to helping them regarding this issue at their facility involving customer-owned equipment. Our field experts are monitoring voltage data on an ongoing basis and continue to report that all FPL equipment is functioning properly. We will continue to work with the customer and all other involved parties to reach a resolution”.
Halpern said after they put in the surge protectors they received an email from FPL stating that there was an issue with the line running from the street to the building and that they had 45 days to get it repaired.
In the email, FPL said it’s the customer’s responsibility to make the repairs, even though they temporarily repaired the line.
Halpern said they would like more clarification and have contacted FPL and they are waiting to hear back.
Halpern said they are willing to pay whatever it takes to fix the issue.
They believe it all started when FPL, the power company replaced a power pole out in front of the business.
“So, the power pole was there for about a year, they actually came to us and they had to shut down our power for four to five hours. It was like a six, seven-hour ordeal on August 7. The first motor started going on August 10th, is the first motor we found,” says Halpern, which also owns Aloma Bowl in Winter Park and Boardwalk Bowl in Orlando.
Read: Florida’s bill banning young teens from social media is raising constitutional red flags
Halpern says they did not realize it was an electrical issue until they lost the upper part of the house.
“Which is the 12 lanes up there. 12 lanes going down a freezer, different coolers all in the same timeframe; all on that side. That was the first thing that said, hey, this has to be something more than just a machine you know, a motor going down. We had the company that does our refrigeration. They are like, you’re getting some kind of surges that are blowing these motors,” said Halpern.
Airport Lanes remained open as they continued to repair and replace the blown-out motors and computer boards, but the new parts started to also become fried due to the power surges.
“So it started to cost a lot to just keep fixing them. Then we had some other freezers, we lost all of our food to the point that it just had to be thrown away. At that point we were trying to open up even with the minimal lanes and then it came to the point where we needed to not turn anything on until FPL comes in and tells us this has been fixed,“ said Halpern who adds that 30 employees have been out of work since Nov. 1, which is heartbreaking since it’s around the holidays.
“It’s sad, for me, my employees that are sitting in home and we’ve lost employees, you know, we understand that they need to, they need to work,“ Halpern said.
An email from FPL to Aloma Bowling Centers stated that they installed a meter to monitor the voltage and that it found that the voltage is within “standard parameters.”
Read: ‘It’s been a nightmare’: Leesburg woman with no heat frustrated with home warranty response
Halpern said they brought in three independent electricians to figure out what the issue is.
All three concluded that the source of the surges stems from not inside the business but with the utility.
In a video recorded by an electrician for Miller Electric, you can see at one point, a major dip in voltage and then a large spike in power that lasts for a split second.
“We’ve reached out for a month now. They put some monitoring on, and we’ve gotten reports. We’ve gotten reports from our electric company. We show the spikes, we show the dips, we are shown the days that things were damaged. And that’s as far as we’ve gotten. We’ve asked to go beyond the gentlemen that have come out. And we’ve gotten nowhere. We’ve got no one that’s reached out to us to say, hey, let’s, let’s go to the next step. There’s nothing,” says Halpern who just wants to solve the issue so they can reopen, which they can’t until the power surge issue is solved. “We just want stable power, So we can get the machines fixed. We have the parts. We can’t put them on until we know for sure. It’s not going to destroy more equipment”.
Aloma Bowling Centers turned to Channel 9 for help with FPL.
Shawn Johnson, a communication specialist for NextEra Energy and FPL sent Channel 9 a statement, which reads: As part of our promise to provide reliable electric service, we have been and will continue to be in communication with the customer regarding this matter. Our field experts actively monitor voltage data, and based on this information, have identified customer-owned equipment to be the cause. We remain committed to working with the customer and helping them reach a resolution.
Halpern said they would like FPL to pinpoint the particular pieces of equipment inside the building that they believe are causing the surges and says their equipment had no issues prior to that power pole being replaced in August telling Channel 9, “Nothing like this. You know, equipment gets, you know, damaged more from just use. These are all electrical problems, not actual hard nut and bolt, you know, physical things that we replace on the machines.
Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
