Nerve Racking Electrical Outage Coincidence

I experienced a strange (and stressful) electrical outage coincidence (?) this morning.

A few weeks ago I had done my normal spring cleaning of the AC condenser an d ran the system for a few minutes to make sure it was ready to go. Everythin g seemed fine and I have not had a need to use the AC since then.

Today, they are calling for hot and humid weather so I figured I would run the AC while I am at work. The house was still comfortable from last night's cool weather, so I just wanted to make sure it didn't heat up during the day, forcing me to cool it down this evening.

I set the thermostat to 2° below the current house temp just to make s ure the condenser fired up and the system went into cooling mode. About 3 minutes later all the power in my house went out. A few seconds later it came back on. A few seconds later it went back off. After a hearty "WTF?" I headed down to the breaker box but before I made it down the basement stairs, the power came back on.

I noticed that furnace blower wasn't running, so I checked the breaker box but everything looked fine. I waited about a minute to see if anything else would happen and then called my neighbor to see if her power had gone out too. She said that she experienced the same on-off power cycle that I did. That made me feel a lot better.

I turned the thermostat to Off then back to Cool and the AC came on and stayed on. Then I went around and reset all the damn clocks.

It was either just a strange coincidence or maybe everyone in my neighborhood decided to turn their AC on at roughly the same time and overloaded the system. Who knows? Anyway, it was not a fun way to start my day.

Reply to
DerbyDad03
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Distribution and sub-transmission feeders will often have " auto-reclosure " feature - sometimes 1-shot ; often 3-shot. - this feature coordinates with the fusing and relaying to restore power after transient faults. Your line probably had a transient fault, rather than an overload.

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John T.

Reply to
hubops

I am familiar with those types of resets.

We had 3-strike relays in the power supplies of the LORAN-C transmitters that I maintained in the USCG. The relay controlled a motor that "manually" drove a circuit breaker back into the "On" position after a transient fault. As long as there were less than 3 faults within a 60 second period, a timer would reset the relay to "zero". If there were 3 faults within a minute, the relay would "strike out" and not allow the motor to reset the breaker.

I'm sure that the modern day systems are a bit more sophisticated than a motor driven piston that literally reset the breaker just like a person would do with their hand. :-)

Reply to
DerbyDad03

a buddy of mine lives in detroit and was working on a garage door opener. he reset the breaker and all the powerwent out in detroit all the way to new york.

that big outage a few years ago

he took tons of abuse for that...........

on a related note i tired of my dish receivers long re boot time

so after snagging a used UPS that was in excellent condition, i plugged the 721 dish recever and tv into the ups.

a few days later we had a power failure and my then wife totally freaked out........

after watching her panic in a real twilight zone moment, i explained what was going on:)

Reply to
bob haller

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