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Unusual Electric Power Failures

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:25PM (#276791)

    I used to be our companies "safety inspector"... that is until I caught upper management changing my reports. I told them to shove it and to find someone else to do it, which was pulling me away from my main duties anyway for a lousy extra 1 hour of pay. The dipshit that took over only pencil whipped the inspection reports, without actually checking anything. About a year later a fire broke out and the first extinguisher that was used didn't work. The inspection tag on it hadn't been filled out since the last time I checked it.