Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the blackouts-and-brownouts dept.

Our power went down yesterday afternoon (December 12). The utility posted a message on their 1-800 number with expected repair time (a few hours later), but no explanation except that ~2000 customers were affected in our suburban area (Northeast USA).

Here's the weird bit -- LED bulbs stayed on, at reduced brightness. I got out a meter and measured 16 VAC in the house. This was enough to make useful light from "dimmable" LED bulbs (happened to be GE brand). After it got dark, we could also see that incandescent bulbs were giving off a faint reddish glow.

16VAC was also enough to keep a Netgear home router/Wi-Fi box going, it must have a switcher in the wall wart that accepts a really wide input voltage range?

Called a friend on the other side of the country who is an EE (with hardware background). He didn't have a good explanation, but suggested that in the process of bringing the grid back up there might be some big voltage swings--recommended unplugging everything we could. Went out to dinner and all was restored when we got home (no damage).

He also told a story from a rural area (near CA-Nevada border) where there was a power failure that upset the normally-balanced split phase -- instead of ~120V on both sides of neutral, the power went to 80V on one side and 160V on the other side of neutral. Equipment on the high voltage side failed due to extended over-voltage, seems that surge suppressors won't deal with this much energy.

Anyone? How does the grid fail-soft?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:01PM (#276807)

    Yes, -the outage- was certainly due to the power company's stuff.

    As soon as the utility came back up, all the voltages were back to normal, so a flakey neutral isn't indicated--not theirs or OP's.

    The mention of 3-phase by LoRdTAW injects the possibility of a lost phase--but I have never been in a place where that is a thing in purely-residential areas[1].
    I also don't recall seeing a 3-phase feed under 177V, so I dismissed that possibility.

    [1] Requiring an additional sizable transformer yard and additional large wires with no monetary gain from that stuff.

    Working from that dataset, my conclusion is that while the power company's feed was dead, logically, the phantom voltage was due to some cause other than the utility.

    -- gewg_