Poor quality electricity supply, is it worth complaining to supplier?

[Jason Arthurs]

I've lived in this house for two years now and as soon as summer arrives so do the periodic electrical dropouts, which is a shame because the batteries in my UPS have just decided they're knackered.

We have a supply which comes from a large pole mounted (two telegraph poles in fact) transformer at the end of the road, the transformer itself appears to be quite ancient and even the 'In event of emergency' telephone number is only three digits indicating it is indeed from a bygone era. We are supplied via overhead cables courtesy of a 'telegraph' pole in the garden.

When the weather gets warmer we experience occasions brownouts, short power outages (usually in the early hours between 4am - 7am) and generally very poor reliability. Our domestic voltage varies between

240-250v, but usually hovers around 248v (as the over voltage alarm on my UPS often complains).

Our local provider is Midlands Electricity Board (npower?), is there any point in complaining or will they simply tell me that everything is within tolerance? Didn't EU harmonization mean our voltage was supposed to be a maximum of 243.8v (i.e. 230v +6%)?

Regards, Jason.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Max voltage is 230+10%=253V.

It might be worth complaining about the brownouts and cuts. I was working for a small software company some years ago in a small village, and we used to get power cuts like this, in our case more often when it started raining. I supplied the log from our UPS with all the evidence in it. It turned out the power company didn't know anything about the problem (it had been going on as long as anyone could remember). They found a fault on the 11kV feeder, and the problem almost completely went away. Still got the odd one when a squirrel hopped across the 11kV lines, and one quite spectacular one when a digger outside went through an 11kV underground cable just after the driver had been told exactly where it was. (Could have been worse -- the other thing he could have hit was a high pressure sewage pipe from the sewage pumping station which pumped several villages' sewage up hill to the sewage works 5 miles away;-).

[tony sayer]

In article , Jason Arthurs writes

Sounds to me like that is within tolerance. Just because your transformer is old and one a pole doesn't mean that its faulty as such. The interruptions to supply could be caused anywhere on the overhead network feeding it.

Other than that has it been dropping which is usually more of a problem. Ours is up at 245 to 8 a lot of the time but the waveforms on it are sometimes "interesting".

Midlands electricity are the people to complain to in this instance but I suspect that they will say its fine.

Perhaps some new batts for the UPS.....

[Ian Stirling]

These can always be replaced. Sometimes even by old car batteries from the scrapyard, otherwise with similar cells, almost always in any case cheaper than the manufacturer wants.

[The Wanderer]

Are you essentially in a quite rural location? Large village, hamlet, many neighbours? You said you'd lived there for a couple of years, did you move from an essentially urban location?

Your brownouts are short-duration interuptions, caused by transient faults, usually something that causes the overhead wires to clash, tripping automatic protection, but then clearing, so that the automatic switchgear can reclose sucessfully onto the circuit. Like it or not, these are one of the downsides of living in a rural location fed by an essentially overhead network.

It would pay you to do some research yourself, if you can. Are there any major rivers or lakes not too far away? Possible locations used by swans or geese. These can frequently cause o/h circuits to clash, but once clear of the wires, the circuits remain intact.

If you identify any such locations, sensibly not more than 2 or 3 miles from where you live, take a quick look for o/h circuits in the vicinity. If there are any there, just take a quick look to see if there is anything at all fitted to the conductors. Bird flight diverters (BFDs) have been in use for quite a few years now. They are often small helical coils that are wrapped periodically onto the wires, the idea being that they make the wires more visible to birds.

Another oddity I came across a few years ago, and we tracked it down more by luck than judgement, was a whole series of auto-recloses that started suddenly, went on for a few weeks, then stopped just as suddenly. Turned out in the end to be a farmer who had turned a bull into a paddock and the bull used to work himself underneath a staywire and use it to scratch his back, causing the o/h's to clash.

What you should do is try to compile a list of how many outages occur over a period of time. If you merely complain 'we seem to be getting lots of outages' you won't really get very far. If you can say 'In the last four weeks we've had 10 outages that occured at these times on these days' you'll stand a much better chance of getting somewhere.

Nah, it was +10% - 6%, I think now it's ±10%. Soemone who is more up to date than me with the latest regulations will pop up before long to confirm.

[The Wanderer]

Never mind about health and safety requirements, The worst thing anyone can do is tell a digger driver where services actually are, a sure-fire guarantee they'll be damaged. :-)

[Andy Wade]

No it's still +10 / -6. The change to -10% was supposed to happen on

1st Jan 2003 but was postponed by 5 years.

BTW isn't the distribution network operation part of the old MEB now called Aquila Networks, or some such?

[Huge]

Agreed. We used to get lots of brief cuts, which prompted me into buying a UPS (reminder: need a bigger one now, the original one will no longer run all the computers). The all-time record being 5 cuts in one day. I called the 'leccy people and actually managed to speak to a real engineer, who said he would "walk the line" for us. (We're on the end of *miles* of 11kV, with a transformer up a pole, like the OP). He never called us back, but the cuts stopped shortly thereafter.

Mind you, that was before 24/7 took over maintenance. We were cut off for 4 days last year and when the engineers eventually arrived (and restored the supply in 20 minutes) they said "We didn't know about you until a couple of hours ago." Next time there's a cut, I shall call the b*stards every hour on the hour until it's fixed.

[Dave Liquorice]

Thats getting close, start logging the voltage as recorded by your UPS, say at 5min intervals. Collect a week or so, hopefully with the brownouts and cuts as well, remember as well as a max there is min (230 -6% or 216v)... Plot them out as a graph with suitable scales to show the problems.

Then make a complaint, when the board come round to measure or perhaps to fit one of their logging meters show them the UPS log plots. It's a bit odd that the failures are in the wee small hours.

[bigcat]

I thought we were now 240 +6% -10%, and France 220 +10% -6%, giving a common range politically described as 230, but in reality still 220 and

240.

240+6% =3D 254.4

240+10% =3D 264 240-6% =3D 225.6 240-10% =3D 216

All adds up

NT

[Doctor Evil]

Just by walking down the lines? Amazing. You could have walked by the line yourself and stopped the cuts too.

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[dave stanton]

Oh I don't know... around here they seem to manage quite well without knowing.

Dave

[Andrew Gabriel]

No, we never were. That's kind of mixed up pre- and post-harmonisation. Pre-harmonisation (prior to 1 Jan 1995 IIRC), we were 240V +- 6%.

No, all CENELEC countries (all the EU countries, prospective EU countries, and others nearby which wanted to join in common voltage regulations) are now 230V nominal. During the interim period (i.e. now), former 240V countries are 230V +10% -6%, and former 220V countries are 230V +6% -10%.

[Kinell]

[e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) wrote in news:429993a6$0 $38038$ [e-mail]:

That would've been heck of a brown-out :-)

[Dan Mills]

A JCB is to services as pigs are to truffles!

Seen this with boring regularity, the 12 inch high pressure gas main was a good one, the digger was ingesting so much gas that turning the key off did NOT stop the engine!

Regards, Dan.

[Martin Evans]

Seeing as the powers that be can make more money by supplying 253v to the consumer than 216v/207v I'd expect everyone in the UK to be sat at around 250v for ever and a day - well until the lights go out for good that is.

With incandesent lamps being "Euro rated" at 230v there is no wonder they last such a short time.

[Eiron]

All my lamps are rated 60w/240v and my supply today is 243v. I've never seen a nominal 250v mains supply in the UK.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I hardly ever buy any incandescent lamps, but the ones I have are marked 240V. I happen to have some bought in France, and they are marked 220-230V.

Prior to standardisation on 240V in 1960, a number of towns in the UK were officially 250V (and some were only 200V, Reading for one).

[Martin Evans]

All your lamps will be *marked* 240v which bears no relationship to what they (and I use the term very loosely) are engineered for.

In the good old days before Brussels stuck their nose in you had 240v lamps that, on a 240v +/- 6% supply would last their prescribed hours. Now you get "240v" lamps that are anything but.

[Jason Arthurs]

Out of interest, what software is available that will log from a UPS? I have an APC SU1400 which has a serial port on the rear, but since the machines it runs are a mix of Linux and proprietary systems PowerChute was never an option.

I've got an old laptop I can run for logging purposes if need be.

Regards, Jason.