Flickering room lights and occasional total power loss. Possible causes?

The main street power cable comes up the alley wall to the provider's fuse unit which has one 100A fuse for my circuit and a separate 60A fuse for my neighbour, so the circuits are quite separate.

Well, whether by luck or design, I suspect luck, the anti-tamper tag is just long enough to allow me to unplug the fuse and reseat it. Had it not been I would just have cut it off! I suspect that whomever managed to get that tag on also unseated the fuse and didn't reseat it fully, possibly leading to this fault, but I'll never really know.

Still, no flickering lights so far so I'm getting more confident.

Probably re-sealed by someone masquerading as a "meter reader".

That is a well known fault with disk meters. You need to turn your main switch off to verify it. This could have massively affected your electricity bills. They might owe you a lot of money.

good luck proving that

ISTR way back in the 60s the same situation pertained. No matter what you switched off, there would always be *some* small residual rotation of the disk. Earth leakage faults, maybe?

Why would that be the least bit difficult?

in the very late 50s (it might have been early 60s) I worked for a short time in SESEB's meter test room. That would havbe been a fail.

We had the same symptoms. It went on for ages, then one afternoon the power went off completely. It turned out that the underground cable from the street to the house was faulty.

Bill

Meters don?t get faults like that.

But that doesn?t explain the meter still rotating slowly. That?s the evidence that the problem isnt just the contacts in the supplier's 100A fuse.

how do you propose to prove when it went out of calibration?

NT

It'll be like any civil case, it goes on the balance of probabilities. So I'll make my claim for 10 years' backdated money they owe me and it'll be for them to prove that it was calibrated correctly in those 10 years if they don't want to pay out. And how will they do that? They can't because they've never done a no load test to see if the meter disc still rotates. I win!

no, with zero evidence for your position you the plaintiff lose.

NT

The above IS the proof s*it-fer-brains

Drivel. I used to help install meters as an apprentice in the Electricity Board. An assessment is made.

feel free to tell us how you'd assess when it went out of calibration.

plainly it does not prove that it's been out of whack for a long period.

On Monday, 10 December 2018 17:08:40 UTC, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:>

I don't think you understand balance of probabilities. The meter has probably been in the house 50+ years and I know for a fact it hasn't been touched in the 11 years I've been in the house. So, on the balance of probabilities, it is reasonable top assume that the meter could have been misreading for all those years and so I should win. Unless you can think of what evidence the electricity board can put up to prove that it has only been misreading for a very short time? I can't think of anything.

The assessment a judge (in common with any reasonable person) would make is that it was quite possible the meter was out of calibration from installation, and since not particular time since then is *more* likely, and since no event to change the calibration can be identified, an error from original calibration is most likely on the balance of probabilities. Unless the electricity company can show any reason to suppose that the problem is more recent, which seems unlikely to me unless a whole group of meters has tended to go wrong after a certain number of years. And they really wouldn't want to admit that, even if it were true.

I agree, though I wouldn't put it past them to claim that my very recent flickering lights problem is somehow meter related and therefore they're equally only very recently liable. They'd have to prove that of course.