Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

[Sam E]

[snip]

Heat pumps don't work well at very low temperatures. IIRC, the emergency heat is normally resistive.

[snip]

[Jeroen Belleman]

Me too! I have three-phase at home. I had a world of difficulty convincing the supplier that his neutral was broken. I ended up with several low power devices broken by overvoltage. No smoke, no fires, fortunately.

This seems to happen much more often than it should. In France, it's common to have aluminium cabling between the power pole and the customer's main breaker. Bad idea. A bad crimp turned out to be the cause.

Jeroen Belleman

[The Natural Philosopher]

I wrote (some of the) firmware for a Gould advance digital oscilloscope. That would work from 48V DC to 250V AC

[John Larkin]

My case was an old Victorian built in 1892. The neutral was grounded to an old gas pipe that was pretty rusted out, so maybe I didn't have a local, redundant neutral connection.

Shocking that the whole thing didn't blow up. I eventually bought the special tool to shut off the gas under the sidewalk and replaced the gas entry pipes.

We have two phases 120-N-120 with, ideally, N connected to a good ground at our breaker panel, and the neighborhood N grounded multiple places. Our new house has a serious ground rod.

Does your system have a local N-G connection? That should prevent the imbalance.

[David Wade]

Air-2-Air heat pumps loose efficiency below about 4C but modern ones continue to provide some output down to -4c. None that I am aware of have resistive heaters, but of course some folks will have separate resistive heaters should the temp drop below -4.

Dave

[Cindy Hamilton]

Sorry. I picked the first link that had triplex. No way for me to know it was geoblocked, but I probably should check my browser's security settings.

[Jeroen Belleman]

No, it doesn't. I believe the star point of three-phase pole pigs is grounded, but that, of course, did not help me here.

Ground fault interrupters here work by summing the currents in the hot and neutral lines and are combined with the main breaker. The neutral must be grounded upstream w.r.t. the GFI for that to work, so it's out of my hands.

Jeroen Belleman

[Commander Kinsey]

It would take great delight in inconveniencing them having to return if I'm out.

Just connect a wire between the 2 points and say it fell into place when the meter melted.

[David Wade]

It does sound old. I have new air2air Mitsubishi in the UK, fairly recent Fujitsu General and older Daikin in Spain. None of these have any resistive heating element, but of course in Spain they are mostly for cooling.

The Mitsubishi are supposed to produce heat down to an outside temp of

-16C but I don't suppose it will produce much at that temp....

.. but I see that suppliers can supply auxiliary heaters for air2water heat pumps, but say generally not needed in the uk...

Dave

[Commander Kinsey]

Mine seems to make a quieter lower grumbling noise when defrosting, no idea what it's doing. Sounds mechanical. The fans are all stopped, there's nothing else in there to make a noise, so I assume the compressor runs slowly or something?

[Commander Kinsey]

I question whether a heatpump is worth it. They cost so much to buy, just to save some electricity when the temperature is favourable for it. Using mine for heating aswell as AC, I wore it out in under 2 years and had to repair it, so I just use it for AC now, since the valve to switch it over is jammed inside.

[Commander Kinsey]

Then killfile me you silly woman.

And I can't be dumb for quoting a fact you can backup with google.

[Commander Kinsey]

Only a heatpump can give you more out than you put in. Just think about it.

Not what I heard - refusing to buy from Russia and Russia refusing to sell it, etc.

[Commander Kinsey]

Are you telling me that never happened?

[Commander Kinsey]

[shakes head in disbelief]

[Commander Kinsey]

An amp clamp is a wonderful device. Wrap it round a meter tail and observe the change as someone turns things on and off. I just did this to measure my parents' oil boiler electricity consumption to fit an appropriately sized backup battery.

[Commander Kinsey]

Sounds like the thermostat is f***ed, will your landlord replace it?

[Commander Kinsey]

It's 2 foot deep, 6 foot tall, 6 foot wide, has 100 CPU cores and 12 GPUs. Total RAM about 300GB.

[Commander Kinsey]

An appropriate breaker or fuse should be present to protect all wiring and transformers. The worst one I saw was where I used to live, next door was a very old house with the cable going in through the eaves of the roof. It came loose and shorted in his attic. Enough to cause sparks to fly from the pole mounted transformer across the road for a considerable time, and lots of loud buzzing. Nothing tripped, his house burnt down. He didn't give a shit, he got a lot off the insurance. I hope the insurance fined the f****it electricity supplier (and the f****it fire brigade who had no key to turn off the supply, and no equipment/skills to put out a live fire).

It's all in parallel. Three live cables (one per phase, each with neutral/earth armour plating) come out of the transformer and run all the way along the street under the pavement. They branch to each house. It would be difficult to add stuff like you suggest.

I sorted it myself with a UPS for anything delicate, which lowers the voltage accordingly.

[Commander Kinsey]

How can the law permit you being charged 5 times too much?

Shit, my meter is digital. They changed it several years ago when I went to two-rate supply.