Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

I thought they just powered up the generator as a motor off the grid, so it's precisely in phase, then started up the fuel input.

I have a pair of old fans I use to cool the garage. They have a large capacitor each. I thought those were for the power factor correction? They're just one phase.

My heat pump's compressor (and it's fans) have capacitors across them. Again, I thought that was for PF.

Since inductors lag 90 degrees, I thought doing that a couple of times could shove it to 120.

There is some industrial strength load management. They have been paying major users to throttle back during winter peaks for ages. The UK energy production infrastructure is on its last legs so there have been serious energy shortages before in very cold snaps with no wind.

Wiki is a bit misleading there. A new scheme has been announced where the "electricity supplier" will pay you not to use so much electricity at peak times. You must have a Smart meter to qualify for the tariff.

The rules are as opaque as hell and only two suppliers have signed up to providing it so far ISTR Ovo and Octopus. The big ones like SSE (who actually *make* electricity as well as box shifting selling it) have not signed up with the new scheme so it will save 1/10 of bugger all.

Correction British Gas & EDF have just signed up but only about 3.5M households have Smart meters out of about 20M so even if all of them were enabled it still isn't really a hill of beans.

What is happening a lot at the moment is that UK energy suppliers are switching people with smart meters who are in payment arrears into a PAYG mode where they get cut off immediately and then have to buy energy credits at a usurious rate for cash instead.

What's the problem? If your company creates widgets and sometimes you aren't making enough to sell, what do you do? Increase production, build another plant, or increase sales price. It's not rocket science.

Ah more bribery to get the spying and government control machines installed.

I heard 50% have smart meters, despite EDF calling me FIFTY times to sell me one. (That's from my phone's call logs, obviously their number is blocked so never rings and they can't leave a message).

It's so funny, a debt to an electricity company has no collateral. You could run up a debt of £50,000, then just not pay. They can't legally cut you off!

It cannot be done more easily than rectifying to DC and constructing a 3 phase *inverter*.

Why don't you try it then? I can assure that they will as a last resort cut you off supply if your account is in serious arrears.

They once tried to cut our village hall off - as in guys with bolt cutters and a court order at the door for non-payment of a bill. Part of the problem was they had been serving their notices on a building with no postal address or post box.

The bill was in dispute since it represented 9x the total usage of electricity ever since the meter was installed decades before. Problem was caused by system thinking it had 6 digits and meter only having 5 so the meter reading muppet zero padded at the wrong end!

It was obviously totally wrong by over 2 orders of magnitude - but that didn't stop them getting a court order. It wasn't physically possible to supply that much power to the building in so short a time!

We did eventually get a formal apology. The guys who came to cut us off were quite red faced when the saw the actual meter reading and had to phone through to their bosses and explain the true situation.

ISTR only domestic water and sewerage cannot be cut off for non-payment although they will take civil enforcement action to get paid.

Well, as I said, I no longer have to bother to open the door for the meter man.

They really work well, no problems detected, AFAIK.

There was no alternative. It was smart meter, or mandatory cut off.

Then emigrate.

It gets worse.

A double whammy. Now that reneawble so called energy is all the rage, together with battery packs and undersea DC links, all that lot is not rotating synchronous mass, it is actually electronic inverters that are designed

So the net result of lowering the frequency is to remove not load, but generating capacity.

At which point whole areas of the country trip out.

Finding cheap second-hand parts and building a rotary converter is one easy DIY option.

However, inverters are pretty cheap these days and there is frequently the option of just changing the motor. It was easier and cheaper 40 years ago to change the motors on my father's lathe, pillar drill and jig borer, than it was to provide 3-phase to them.

They work really well here too. People are finding their smart meters have moved them onto more expensive tarriffs without their knowledge. And their true use - to cut people off when the load is too high - seems to be being revealed

No one asked me if I wanted to be born, but here I am. Life's a bitch. And then you die.

Waste of what? If you heat with electricity heat is wasted in the cooling towers of the power station .

It doesn't freeze the food, even milk. The ice is on the back of the fridge part. There is a drain to get rid of water condensed there but it freezes instead.

The highest efficiency gas fired power station is aroung 62% efficient. Then there are 5% transmission losses.

A condensing gas boiler is over 90% efficient.

Even with a heat pump (annual average 2.5 to 3 COP), it is cheaper to use gas, that costs 1/3 the price of electricity - and has the advantage that a boiler is far cheaper to replace if it fails than a heat pump, plus it can far more effectively heat a house cyclicly, rather than using lower level heat almost continuously (even when people are not there) and it doesn't require water storage.

That doesn't happen here. Someone called and the client said "yes".

No revelation here, we knew.

Their first step was to mandatorily insert a current limiter at the entry box, with a lead seal for not tampering. But people tampered it, with a "jumper". So the next move was smart meter with current limiter included. End of customer fraud.

This happens when the fridge can not cope with the load.

It can be the fridge is simply a bad design. The evaporator or cold surface is too small. It can be that the door is opened too many times. That the door doesn't close tight. Summer (or house heating to high). Whatever.

Remedies are lowering the fridge thermostat (higher temp). The thing is, ice is an insulator, so the inside of the fridge will not get any colder.

Another possibility is placing a small fan (5 cm dia is enough) inside the fridge blowing across the ice. Caveat is that this may distort the working of the thermostat, and you have to lower it down or you convert the fridge into a freezer.

Or, put the fan on a timer: blow for half an hour, stop for half an hour (this is what I did).

This may put a higher load on the heat radiator on the back, if it can not evacuate all the heat generated there. Solution would be another small fan blowing there.

Similar for forced-air gas furnaces, which are the most common type of heating in the U.S (60% of American homes). Mine is above 90%.