The optical network has become the most important way to carry power communications. To ensure its high reliability, operators need to detect the cables of the network periodically, which need to enter the substations. However, the large number and scattered location of substations bring challenges to the optical cable detection for the power communication optical network. This paper studies such multi-period optical cable detection problem of optical network in the context of power communication. With the objective of minimizing the total number of entered substations, we developed an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model and a corresponding heuristic algorithm is also proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm can effectively reduce the total number of entered substations and perform close to the results of ILP model.