Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

[hubops]

Telecom contractors get-away-with a lot .. - power company - less so . John T.

[trader_4]

Modern fridges aren't using much, like 80W when the compressor is running, except during defrost when it briefly is a lot higher.

[Fredxx]

No, you're spot on. It has been discussed in this group before. In general, 60Hz transformers can either be more efficient or smaller than their 50Hz cousins.

[John Larkin]

Yes. Comcast makes insane messes and doesn't care.

Can't wait for 6G or 8G or whatever, no wires.

[Cindy Hamilton]

Nice. I can see where a crowded city like SF would end up like that. I live in an exurban "neighborhood" of 1- and 2-acre lots, carved out from cornfields just after WWII.

[Carlos E.R.]

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Connection denied by Geolocation Setting.

Reason: Blocked country:

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[Rod Speed]

NY [e-mail] wrote

We had a brand new US manufactured mass spectrometer quite literally catch fire because it didnt like running on 50Hz instead of 60Hz. The main transformer overheated and caught fire.

Nope, you have it the right way round.

[Vir Campestris]

(top posted for Brian)

I've got a bunch of devices intended for the US market which will run on

100-250 volts. The recent one I have which won't run on 100 is the TV.

Which won't work in the US anyway because the standards are different.

Andy

[Sam E]

[snip]

Heat pumps don't work well at very low temperatures. IIRC, the emergency heat is normally resistive.

[snip]

[Jeroen Belleman]

Me too! I have three-phase at home. I had a world of difficulty convincing the supplier that his neutral was broken. I ended up with several low power devices broken by overvoltage. No smoke, no fires, fortunately.

This seems to happen much more often than it should. In France, it's common to have aluminium cabling between the power pole and the customer's main breaker. Bad idea. A bad crimp turned out to be the cause.

Jeroen Belleman

[The Natural Philosopher]

I wrote (some of the) firmware for a Gould advance digital oscilloscope. That would work from 48V DC to 250V AC

[John Larkin]

My case was an old Victorian built in 1892. The neutral was grounded to an old gas pipe that was pretty rusted out, so maybe I didn't have a local, redundant neutral connection.

Shocking that the whole thing didn't blow up. I eventually bought the special tool to shut off the gas under the sidewalk and replaced the gas entry pipes.

We have two phases 120-N-120 with, ideally, N connected to a good ground at our breaker panel, and the neighborhood N grounded multiple places. Our new house has a serious ground rod.

Does your system have a local N-G connection? That should prevent the imbalance.

[David Wade]

Air-2-Air heat pumps loose efficiency below about 4C but modern ones continue to provide some output down to -4c. None that I am aware of have resistive heaters, but of course some folks will have separate resistive heaters should the temp drop below -4.

Dave

[Cindy Hamilton]

Sorry. I picked the first link that had triplex. No way for me to know it was geoblocked, but I probably should check my browser's security settings.

[Jeroen Belleman]

No, it doesn't. I believe the star point of three-phase pole pigs is grounded, but that, of course, did not help me here.

Ground fault interrupters here work by summing the currents in the hot and neutral lines and are combined with the main breaker. The neutral must be grounded upstream w.r.t. the GFI for that to work, so it's out of my hands.

Jeroen Belleman

[Commander Kinsey]

It would take great delight in inconveniencing them having to return if I'm out.

Just connect a wire between the 2 points and say it fell into place when the meter melted.

[David Wade]

It does sound old. I have new air2air Mitsubishi in the UK, fairly recent Fujitsu General and older Daikin in Spain. None of these have any resistive heating element, but of course in Spain they are mostly for cooling.

The Mitsubishi are supposed to produce heat down to an outside temp of

-16C but I don't suppose it will produce much at that temp....

.. but I see that suppliers can supply auxiliary heaters for air2water heat pumps, but say generally not needed in the uk...

Dave

[Commander Kinsey]

Mine seems to make a quieter lower grumbling noise when defrosting, no idea what it's doing. Sounds mechanical. The fans are all stopped, there's nothing else in there to make a noise, so I assume the compressor runs slowly or something?

[Commander Kinsey]

I question whether a heatpump is worth it. They cost so much to buy, just to save some electricity when the temperature is favourable for it. Using mine for heating aswell as AC, I wore it out in under 2 years and had to repair it, so I just use it for AC now, since the valve to switch it over is jammed inside.

[Commander Kinsey]

Then killfile me you silly woman.

And I can't be dumb for quoting a fact you can backup with google.