Power outage

small ones tend to use petrol.

Give UK Power Networks a severe talking to. More than one power cut per week is not acceptable, even if they are just a second or so of an auto-recloser doing its thing. That number of outages strongly indicates something wrong with the distribution and they need to find it and fix it, pronto. If you can gather evidence of the past outages and record any new ones to make your case.

You might be able to get a really old (antique) set that will run on paraffin. These days fuel will be petrol, LPG or diesel (which can be red diesel which is 40 - 50p ish per litre cheaper than road diesel).

If you want to use the house wiring you open up a big can of worms. It's fairly easy to sort out making sure it's absolutely impossible to back feed your supply. BFO, break before make/center off/change over switch in the tails.

The harder one to sort out is the protective earthing. Under fault conditions you can't rely on the supply earth still being earth. This implies you have to supply your own, easy enough (ish) an earth stake and bond that to the generator frame and one phase of the bi-phase alternator output.

Trouble is how do you connect that combined "neutral" and earth into the houses protective earth system without connecting it to the the supply earth (which might not be earth under fault conditions). Fairly sure the regs do not allow a switches etc in the earth connections of an installation...

We have a 2 kVA electric start diesel set. It gets wheeled out if the DNO says an outage is going to be more than about 6 hours. Weather dependant, if it's cold and stormy it might get wheeled out with a shorter projected outage. It's only used to keep the fridges, freezers, central heating and aquarium (fresh, cold water) filter running. Those are powered by extension cables from the genset, no local earth is provided and no bond between the generator frame and an alternator phase. In effect the "live" and "neutral" wires in the extension cables are both floating and, in theory, safe to come into contact with as which ever you do will just get pulled down to "earth". I think the "earth" wire in the extension cables is connected to the generator frame.

I'm thinking that repalcing the gensets isolator switch with a 16 A, double pole, 30 mA, RCBO might be a "good idea". At least then if what leaves the genset doesn't come back it trips off.

Diesel ones can, but they are the bigger generators.

Some done have enough power to start fridges and freezers.

And start at the £2-300 mark for one that probably won't let you down. You can get cheaper ones if you don't mind spending hours stripping it down and trying to get it to start when you actually need it.

Diesel ones would probably run on heating oil and start around the £1000 mark for something in the 5kW+ class. They all tend to be a bit noisy (and in the case of deisel smelly).

The fridge/freezer compressor motor cold start is a surprisingly nasty load and may overload trip a smaller generator. I have a 2.5Kw petrol generator for serious power cuts but can mostly run with solid fuel heating and cooking on the wood burning stove if I have to.

You have to look after it if it is to be reliable in an emergency. Owning one and leaving it to rust away in a garden shed is not enough.

is that what used to be called a power cut? .....

too much experience of that one :) A genny was the only power source for quite a long time.

I don't think we had any earthing system or RCD. Times have changed.

Regarding voltage of 3kVA ones: plug a kettle in and V_out & f dropped way way down. They were not inverter types of course. Their 3kVA rating was optimism. They probably could deliver it for a second until the engine speed dropped.

Heating oil is paraffin, which lacks the lubrication of diesel. Some diesel engines will run on it, albeit with more wear, some don't survive it. Some diesels will also run on filtered waste veg oil. It's quite possible to mix paraffin with filtered waste oil, if your engine is a type that is ok with that.

However.... for one 11hr event a genny sounds like huge overkill. Get yourself a gaslight, they're far more reliable than electric. Cook on a fire if you have some reason to really want to.

NT

Heating oil, aka paraffin, is rather more volatile than diesel, I wouldn't try it.

Of course the OP might have an old oil fired heating system that runs on "gas oil", aka diesel...

Agreed the "little smokey" 750 W ish petrol two stroke jobbies don't like starting motors. A four stroke petrol of 1.5 kVA (or more) should be OK.

Agreed, our diesel set being electric start has a small solar panel connected to the battery to keep that topped up. You can pull start it but it's hard work... About once a year I wheel it out, check it over, start it and run it for a couple of hours with a fan heater as a load, occasionally altering the load from fan only, 1kW or 2 kW.

I think the TL;DR is the UK simply hasn't enough capacity, and (like water) certainly not in the right places ?

And with operation Yellowhammer ramping up, I suspect no one at UKPN will give a s*it about glitches like this for the foreseeable future ?

We have a Chinese one (a Honda clone) which is converted to run on LPG instead of petrol which might be a handy option if you have bottled gas around (e.g. for barbecue). We use it on our boat which has LPG for cooking.

The generator (Loncin LC2500DC) with conversion to LPG cost just under £400 in 2012. It's 2/2.5kW.

to me, a power cut is deliberate (as in the Miners' dispute) whereas a power outage simply implies a loss of power.

outages

At this time of year, with relatively low demand, there is plenty of capacity. Apart from the other Friday the last time there was a capacity issue, leading to power cuts, was 2008 when Longannet and Sizewell dropped of the grid at almost the same time. All other power cuts are due to problems in the local distribution, JCB through cable, tree falling on overhead line, overload, etc, all of which handled by the DNO.

Wrong.

Outages are almost always cased by a link failure. Transissionline transforme or WHY.

Operation yellowhammer is largely fiction.

That was not a capacity issue.

That was an issue with lack of spinning generation on the network

Due to too much imported and renewable generation being on instead

the last time there was a

Powercuts here are usually lightning strikes or tree damage onto the overheads

They hacve got markedly less frequent since I have been here as more is undergrounded and trees are cut back pre-emptively

OP is suffering a power cut every week, "nearly ten in two months". Doesn't say how long they were though, only that the last was 11 hours.

And give out way more and far less directional light for longer from a single "charge" than any electric light source I've encountered. When a cyclinder runs out you can just replace it with a full one. A replacement that doesn't self discharge when sat on the shelf doing nothing for a few years or even decades...

Or get a camping stove of some sort. We have a two ring and grill one running from a 17 kg bottle of butane.

According to the interim report they had 1 GW of reserve as required by the regulaor, but lost 1.378 GW. Meaning a short term lack of capacity to meet demand, hence the frequency droop and low frequency disconnects.

Girlie is passing the matter to the Area manager, it seems.

We were out yesterday evening, but on getting home there was a bloke in a van across the road (the last 11kV pole plus transformer is just across from us), he said, and this was 8.5 hours into the outage, that there were 8 blokes working on this incident as it wasn't obvious (yet) where the fault was. They were using the tradition software debugging method of dividing the network and seeing if they could restart a portion of it, then moving on. He was carrying a pole with a small box at the end, some sort of measuring/detection device. He also said there were still 150 houses without power.

Doesn't sound like heating oil is a goer, pity because we have a tank of that.

Thanks for that Dave.

No, it's ordinary heating oil. Boiler is a couple of years old. No gas.

Hmmm, quite a few useful points made here about capacity, fuel, size, earthing etc. Ta all.

The interinm report is deliberately leaving out sonmething

First there was plenty of capacity - Dinoriwg was ramped up very quickly. But not quickly enough to stop the massive frequancy drop from causing other generators to trip offline.

It is highly disinegenioust to say 'the generators tripping were the cause' when in fact it was the massive and rapid frequency drop that cause the generators to trip...and that was down to not enough soinning mass on te grid

It looks like te wndfarms tripped then the frequency dropped that tripped Brarford and then load shedding started

A lighting strike - a few seconds of overload - started this.

If it had been spinning turbines then as soon as the strike short cleared all would have reconnected.

Exactly gas at 30%, 20% nuke is around 50% coneventional spinng, and if you add in solar power that is embedded and so not recoirded as meeting anty demand (it lowers effective demandL: real demand was higer) you will realise that coneventional spinning generatirs were less than 50% of the real demand.

Well, Xmas about 4 years ago we were off for two days. Had to take the turkey to a friend's in Canterbury to be cooked.

We have a small one-ring portable gas cooker from when the kitchen was out of action. That runs on small canisters from Go-Outdoors at £10 for

2. The gaslight sounds like a good idea, too.

I'll have to check whether anyone in the village has done this, SWMBO thinks there may be one or two.