Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

Or you could buy a cheap car alternator (which is a 1 kW 3 phase generator) and physically power it from a single phase 1kW motor. Noisy though, but if you're using it to poser a three phase motor anyway....

We never had knob & tube.

same size as yours the smallest, which dont have space for a 3rd pin, have a sliding or folding pin.

everything is. I think a 2pin variant should be added, fitting the same sockets.

That's why I deliberately put a blank line before the part of the sentence I commented on.

Since Russia is the source of half the world's gas, when we refuse to buy it, or they won't let us, there isn't enough gas.

They're (form your point of view) pointless, and a possible source of spying and control. Why would you be happy with this? They can turn off your power at will!

You can't be bothered to connect them all to the decent service? In the UK, we call that sort of TV "council telly" - it's what you have when you have no money.

People will do what they want to or can afford to. That advert was pointless.

At 27C I'm too warm naked. I assume that's not allowed in your public buildings.

Nobody asked me if I wanted expensive power instead of cheap Russian power. I have nothing against Putin, I want to use his cheap gas.

Stuff shouldn't be running so close to the limit and without cutouts. What happens if you try to overrev your car engine?

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.