Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

It gets worse.

A double whammy. Now that reneawble so called energy is all the rage, together with battery packs and undersea DC links, all that lot is not rotating synchronous mass, it is actually electronic inverters that are designed

So the net result of lowering the frequency is to remove not load, but generating capacity.

At which point whole areas of the country trip out.

Finding cheap second-hand parts and building a rotary converter is one easy DIY option.

However, inverters are pretty cheap these days and there is frequently the option of just changing the motor. It was easier and cheaper 40 years ago to change the motors on my father's lathe, pillar drill and jig borer, than it was to provide 3-phase to them.

They work really well here too. People are finding their smart meters have moved them onto more expensive tarriffs without their knowledge. And their true use - to cut people off when the load is too high - seems to be being revealed

No one asked me if I wanted to be born, but here I am. Life's a bitch. And then you die.

Waste of what? If you heat with electricity heat is wasted in the cooling towers of the power station .

It doesn't freeze the food, even milk. The ice is on the back of the fridge part. There is a drain to get rid of water condensed there but it freezes instead.

The highest efficiency gas fired power station is aroung 62% efficient. Then there are 5% transmission losses.

A condensing gas boiler is over 90% efficient.

Even with a heat pump (annual average 2.5 to 3 COP), it is cheaper to use gas, that costs 1/3 the price of electricity - and has the advantage that a boiler is far cheaper to replace if it fails than a heat pump, plus it can far more effectively heat a house cyclicly, rather than using lower level heat almost continuously (even when people are not there) and it doesn't require water storage.

That doesn't happen here. Someone called and the client said "yes".

No revelation here, we knew.

Their first step was to mandatorily insert a current limiter at the entry box, with a lead seal for not tampering. But people tampered it, with a "jumper". So the next move was smart meter with current limiter included. End of customer fraud.

This happens when the fridge can not cope with the load.

It can be the fridge is simply a bad design. The evaporator or cold surface is too small. It can be that the door is opened too many times. That the door doesn't close tight. Summer (or house heating to high). Whatever.

Remedies are lowering the fridge thermostat (higher temp). The thing is, ice is an insulator, so the inside of the fridge will not get any colder.

Another possibility is placing a small fan (5 cm dia is enough) inside the fridge blowing across the ice. Caveat is that this may distort the working of the thermostat, and you have to lower it down or you convert the fridge into a freezer.

Or, put the fan on a timer: blow for half an hour, stop for half an hour (this is what I did).

This may put a higher load on the heat radiator on the back, if it can not evacuate all the heat generated there. Solution would be another small fan blowing there.

Similar for forced-air gas furnaces, which are the most common type of heating in the U.S (60% of American homes). Mine is above 90%.

To generate clean sine 230/400 V three phase you need about +/- 340 Vdc bus voltage. There are several methods to generate this DC voltage from single phase 230 V, such as:

• Use a voltage doubler rectifier, since the peak-to-peak voltage is

• Put an auto transformer in front of the voltage doubler. This would help somewhat but would be heavy.
• Use a DC/DC boost converter between the single phase rectifier and the DC capacitors. If a PFC is required, it is usually implemented with a DC/DC boost converter. Adjust it lo generate at least +/- 340 V. As the DC/DC converter can be used for both PFC as well as boosting the DC bus voltage, so not much extra cost needed.

Do you find that forced (ducted) air central heating actually keeps the house warm? I suppose it must work, or 60% of American homes wouldn't use it!

My parents bought a brand new house in the early 1970s (so 1970s technology (*), admittedly!) which had gas-fired ducted-air central heating. And the house was never really warm, especially at the remote end of the ducts, where you got a feeble waft of tepid air. Even the ducts right next to the boiler/furnace gave out tepid air, even if there was more of it. And the house was very dusty because the constant draught kept dust circulating in the air. Our neighbours replaced their CH system with radiators when the boiler needed replacing twenty years later, rather than going for another ducted-air boiler. They said to us "at last the house is warm".

At least our ducted-air system was fairly quiet. When we were looking for a house a couple of years ago, we looked round one with a heat-pump/ducted-air system which emitted a constant moaning whining noise throughout the whole house - you couldn't escape from the infernal whining.

(*) The boiler was massive: about the depth and width of a typical fridge, but about 7 feet high - a floor-to-ceiling cabinet. The only room in the house that was really warm was the downstairs toilet which had the boiler in it, which suggests that a lot of the heat from the burning of the gas was wasted to the room rather than going into the ducted air.

Yes, I do. It keeps the house at a comfy 71 F (that's about 21.7 C). The filters in the return-air plenum clean the air. The furnace is about 20 years old and it's still performing beautifully. It is installed in the basement; not all the ducts there are insulated, yet enough warm air makes it throughout our single-story house to warm even the farthest rooms.

Last year we spent about $70 on heating in February. I expect it might be a bit more this year.

It also affords us an opportunity for central air-conditioning, for the hot and humid days of summer.

No, it's because the thermostat is faulty or badly calibrated. Every few days the compressor *might* turn off, usually for about three hours. I can live with it.

Certainly does here. No one except poms use water based central heating here and very few poms here do either.

Yep.

Just a hopelessly done system.

We don't get that here.

Another stupid design. You can't hear anything with ours.

Yeah, f***ed by design.

Not when there is ice in the evaporator surface. It is not a problem with the thermostat at all.

and in transmission lines.

Carlos, I hope you have a CO detector? It doesn't take a lot to go wrong with a portable stove to produce poison gas.

Andy

My late mother relates a story from presumably the 1920s, in which she and her sister and young brother were playing in a room with a paraffin heater. In the sort of trust in adults displayed by BBC audiences,, the ideas that she couldn't see in front of her for black smoke, and was coughing, didn't seem to create any alarm whatsoever until her father rushed in and opened all the windows and dragged the children out.