Many South End residents have lost power in recent months. While some dark stretches were from system malfunctions, some residents had their power cut for scheduled maintenance at the end of September without being notified by Eversource, the region’s power company. With many residents working from home or attending school remotely, unexpected power cuts can have a significant impact.

This month, Eversource is upgrading its electrical grid in the South End. Scheduled for October 8 through November 11, the maintenance will modernize the neighborhood’s power switches so they can be operated remotely. In a note to neighborhood leaders, Eversource wrote that affected customers would be notified about the scheduled maintenance by mail, and that all units would be placed on a generator during the repairs.

But when the maintenance plan was posted on October 3 on the South End Community Board, a neighborhood Facebook page, some area residents pointed out that they had already lost power.

“This may have already happened on Pembroke [Street] this week,” commented resident Caryn King on the Facebook post.

“It took us all by surprise,” King told the Boston Guardian. “There was no heads up.”

Early on the morning of September 29, several Pembroke Street residents lost power for several hours, according to King. Having been shut off at around 4am, the power was restored by a generator around 7am. Lights then flickered throughout the day while Eversource trucks worked on Tremont Street.

“You could see all the lights on the full street flickering that first night,” King said. “It was almost like a scary movie.”

The following evening, on September 30, King’s home was switched off the generator and back onto the grid.

In the past, King said she has usually received an automated phone call from Eversource that notifies her of scheduled maintenance outages.

A second resident reported a similar experience. “Same thing over on Appleton, we were part of this project last week,” wrote the resident on Facebook on October 3.

“We lost power multiple nights in a row for 3-7 hours and also an entire 24 hours after the generator failed.”

Last Sunday, Mark Douglass, another South Ender, lost power for the fourth time since August.

“I can count on less than one hand how many times we’ve lost power over the last ten years,” Douglass told the Guardian. “but in the past three months it’s happened four times.” The first incident at Douglass’s home lasted between six and eight hours, he said, while the other three were five hours, two hours, and an hour and a half in length.

“It’s frustrating when you pay a lot of money for power delivery and it seems like [the losses] have been too frequent lately,” he said.

Last Sunday’s outage was caused by an “equipment issue,” according to Eversource spokesperson Reid Lamberty. “We are replacing two transformers. This should help alleviate any future outages,” he wrote in an email.

In recent years, neighborhood leaders have met with Eversource over complaints from residents who lost power for hours at a time.

“We had meeting with them a year ago, and we basically said that we were sick and tired of Eversource doing improvements or doing repairs and leaving customers for hours and hours without generation,” Steve Fox, chair of the South End Forum, a coalition of neighborhood groups, told the Guardian. “We’ve asked them to be conscious of the fact that more and more people are working at home, and we can’t let businesses and residents to go without power generation,” Fox said.

Eversource maintains it notifies all of its customers prior to maintenance work, but that sometimes the account holder is a landlord instead of a tenant, Lamberty wrote.

“We understand the impacts outages have on our customers, and we work diligently to minimize these disturbances as much as possible.”