Not the same thing at all. If you want to reduce usage, you turn things down or off. If the whole country wants to do that over a short period due to high demand, they can't very well phone everyone up and tell you to delay your coffee for half an hour, they have to lower the voltage.
I have a stupid fridge freezer which I can't adjust, it actually has only one thermostat! I either have the fridge frozen, or the freezer too warm. My LG fridge freezer is more sensible, the compressor cools the freezer, on command of the thermostat in the freezer part, and the fridge is cooled by a fan blowing air between them, on command of the fridge thermostat.
If the neutral line is lost or a bad connection the line voltage in a house could have one side to be very low and the other side very high in the US system.
A number of years ago the power company put on the television stationa a message asking people to turn off things due to a power shortage. They did and the next year the company asked to raise rates due to not enoughpower was used.
Some have devices on the water heater and AC or heat pumps that allow the power companies to shut them off. Mine has one on the heat pump and saves me a few dollars on every bill just for having it.
There is a type of electricity contract in which you accept the provider will remotely switch off your heavy appliances to reduce power overall for some time. In exchange, you pay less.
Domestic fridge power consumption is typically between 100 and 250 watts. Over a full day, a fridge records between 1 to 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of total energy usage, or about $150 per year per fridge.Nov 13, 2019
How Much Power a Fridge Uses - in Watts, Cost & kWh
As has been explained, reducing voltage is a crap idea. You can email folk and ask them to reduce consumption at peak time though. I got refunds last December for doing this.
Eventually when we’re all on smart meters, more variable tariffs will become available that will encourage this behaviour will become the norm.
I only know of one person with that, but it's more extensive. He has a huge water tank heated by electricity when the power company tell it to. The central heating is radiators which pump that water round the house.
But the idea is to reduce peak load. Spreading that out for longer is exactly what they're after.
If they want to reduce annual load, they just need to turn up the cost of electricity, but the stupid UK government is now subsidising it, so we're just carrying on using as much as we like.
And my purely resistive loads are controlled by thermostat, so if you lower the voltage they stay on for a longer time, so the saving effect on the network is nil.
Maybe. Maybe not. They can tell you that you submitted them to a voltage out of specs. If it burns, sue the electrical company to pay you a new device, because it is their fault.
A traditional fridge could burn out on a brown out, the motor would overheat trying to compensate.
The electricity companies know this, and will not do a brownout, but switch off completely. Or do rolling blackouts.
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