Electricity questions (longish)

Chris Hogg · 2022-07-20T17:26:27+00:00

I volunteer at my local history Archive. We occupy school-roomsattached to a local Methodist chapel. Roughly every four months thechapel people give us a bill for the electricity we've used in theArchive. Needless to say, the bills recently have been going throughthe roof. Unfortunately, churches etc. don't qualify for the cap onenergy prices recently imposed by OFGEM for domestic users, whichdoesn't help! As we're a voluntary organisation relying purely ondonations to keep us going, we've been trying to cut back, otherwiseit may break us.I got involved because I couldn't understand how we were apparentlyusing so much electricity, and thought something must be wrongsomewhere. Very few of the Archive volunteers have any technicalknowledge, nor it seems do the people from the chapel. "In the land ofthe blind, the one-eyed man is king". I am that one-eyed man!I have established that the chapel has a 3-phase supply. There are twometers on the distribution board. One is an Ampy polyphase meter, very similar to an Ampy 5219, which I think isthe primary meter, the second is an old-fashioned spinning disc type which I'm lead to believe records just theelectricity used by the Archive. There is also a little unit that Ithink is a timer of some sort . There are threeconsumer units DB2, DB3 and DB4, , and respectively. Asyou can see, there are MCB's for a lot of night store heaters, five inthe chapel, DB3, and nine in the school-room, DB4, but in fact thetotal number between the chapel and the school-room is only abouteight, so I presume most of the MCB's are not connected, especiallythose in the schoolroom. A general view of the distribution board ishere Two of the three CU's are off-screen atthe bottom. The whole thing appears to have been installed in 2009 orearlier, judging by the label in the lid of DB2.Is that primary meter a 'smart' meter? The chapel people send areading to the supplier, SSE, at regular intervals, but only a singlereading which includes both chapel...

Jul 20, 2022 Last reply: 3 years ago 42 Replies

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Chris J Dixon 3 years ago

My parents used it on the living room door. We had coal fires, and in high winds the strip acted like the reed in a wind instrument.

Chris

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Rob Morley 3 years ago

We had copper strip on the front door, it sounded like a very poorly played bassoon when there was a good storm blowing. I have some in the useful things drawer but we don't catch the wind so much here, and the PVC draught strip hasn't completely disintegrated yet.

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