Just two hours after power was restored to Wairarapa after a major outage on Tuesday, more than a thousand Masterton South residents lost power again.
The Kuripuni shopping village was left in the dark with store owners standing in their doorways waiting for the power to come back on.
Theevening power cut was not related to the earlier outage at national grid operator Transpower's substation, which affected almost 40,000 people in Wairarapa.
Due to a fault on Powerco's network, electricity was cut to 1200 properties about 6pm, said Dean Stevenson, Powerco's acting network operations manager.
He said supply to the majority of properties was restored at 8.45pm.
"A generator was connected at 12.15am to supply the remaining customers while repairs were made to the faulty piece of equipment.
"We'll be investigating what caused the fault."
Earlier in the day, the Wairarapa and Hutt regions lost power when a bird's nest blew on to electrical equipment, causing a fire at Transpower's Masterton substation.
