Powercuts

[Nutkey]

My dad had a powercut this morning, for about 5hrs - i.e. long enough to chat to the neighbours. He claims that only a few of his neighbours were affected - those who get their electricity from Eon.

I know almost nothing about electricity distribution, but I don't see how this can be correct. Surely all houses in an area are served by the same substation using the same wires, and therefore if one house is down, then they all are (or at least all the ones on the same phase).

Am I missing something?

[JMB]

No, you are right ... it all comes from the same regional supplier. A small outage may affect only a small number of houses ... which houses will depend on how the street is connected.

Someone who knows more might explain.

JB.

[Chris Bartram]

I believe that in a typical street, houses are wired spread over the 3 phases, so if No.1 is on red, No.3 will be on yellow, and 5 on blue, so it could have been every 3rd house?

In practice the spread probably isn't quite so even, but you get the idea.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No.

however if a section of cable needs to be isolated, that may be just a few houses. When they did my underground cable, they isolated just me and one other property, and we both had generators hooked up instead.

That was essentially the whole of the underground section..they physically unhooked it from the poles where it joins.

Also, what I did NOT know, is that 11KV is a ring apparently, so you CAN still feed everybody with a bit chopped out of the middle.

[ARWadsworth]

So. You just bypass the meter.

[The Other Mike]

Or Brown, Black and Grey in the new wonderful world of bland indistinguishable colours

[John Rumm]

You probably want a smart bypass to go with your smart meter!

[Owain]

Possibly if radio teleswitch meters were used, Eon erroneously sent a "turn everything off" signal instead of a "turn economy 7 off" signal. I don't know if teleswitch meters have the peak supply switched or not, but that's about the only way multiple customers could be affected by a retailer, rather than a DNO.

Owain

[Tabby]

I would expect smart meters to have the means to detect many such events, given the situation.

NT

[ARWadsworth]

You expect too much.

[Ala]

I saw a television report the other day about how easy it is to hack smart meters

[Nightjar]

Not sure how a smart meter would detect someone cutting a hole through a party wall and driving a couple of nails into their neighbour's meter tails, to mention but one method of overcoming being cut off that we came across when I worked in the industry.

Colin Bignell

[The Wanderer]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010 08:17:05 +0000, Nightjar Not sure how a smart meter would detect someone cutting a hole through a

The *one* thing you can be certain of, the ingenuity of the determined fraudster knows no bounds......