LED lights

[peakbagger]

If its public utility, its time to contact the Public Utility Commission in writing and keep very good records. If the PUC starts an enquiry, lot of folks with hardhats usually show up quickly. First thing they do is try to BS their way out of it and blame it on the customer, then they grudgingly bring a tech in to install a power quality meter (preferably while in the background, they are fixing what is probably wrong) and then after week of monitoring they remove the power quality meter and leave the customer hanging. Thats is when the customer contacts the PUC again in writing, documents everything and then more hard hats show up and then its gets resolved.

Meanwhile, look around for a quality household surge suppressor with big MOVs and low clamp voltage. Either that consider looking around for a MG set

 

[Ashful]

If its public utility, its time to contact the Public Utility Commission in writing and keep very good records. If the PUC starts an enquiry, lot of folks with hardhats usually show up quickly. First thing they do is try to BS their way out of it and blame it on the customer, then they grudgingly bring a tech in to install a power quality meter (preferably while in the background, they are fixing what is probably wrong) and then after week of monitoring they remove the power quality meter and leave the customer hanging. Thats is when the customer contacts the PUC again in writing, documents everything and then more hard hats show up and then its gets resolved.

Meanwhile, look around for a quality household surge suppressor with big MOVs and low clamp voltage. Either that consider looking around for a MG set

Thanks, maybe I should do that. Trouble is, other than maybe a few date stamps I can extract from complaints submitted to this forum, I've kept zero records of all the past events. But I suspect PECO should have a good record of all service calls made to them.

They'd have a lot of trouble BS'ing their way out of over-voltage. It's not like I'm running any power generation, here. I'm also an MSEE, and so while I don't work in the power utility industry, we speak the same language.

I'm not aware of any whole-house system that can deal with continuous over-voltage. Even most UPS's will not correct for that, only one of the three I have on my desk does, I've been monitoring them today. Surge suppressors are good practice, but I don't think I'm having any unique trouble there, I don't believe they would do anything for the trouble I've been having.

It's really only motor loads, and possibly the aforementioned LED lighting, that suffer from this overvoltage. Most electronics these days has wide-ranging supplies, and can handle this just fine. No real worry about computers or televisions, but the 12-odd heat pumps we have here are surely all suffering, as did my pool pump motor and air compressor motor (just blew another start capacitor).

I did manage to get the pool pump motor to reset, after removing power for several minutes. We'll see how she holds. Variable speed motor, and if there's thermal protection, it must be the internal auto-reset variety... no external motor starter or thermal switch to reset.

 

[gthomas785]

If nothing gets done today expect the voltage to dip in the mid-late afternoon and rise again late at night. You might think about turning off a few sensitive loads.

 

[gthomas785]

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[Ashful]

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Cute... but all are way too small to handle our mains power. I'd have to reconfigure my panels and dedicate one of those units to each sub-panel.

 

[peakbagger]

I used to have to deal with the small mainframe computer room at the main office of the company I worked for 30 years ago. They had a ubiquitous IBM 360 and a newer Vax. The computer room never was engineered so I initially had to deal with HVAC issues and eventually installed a Liebert HVAC system with an Infared humidifier. No one else in my engineering group wanted to deal with our computer folks who were the stereotypical main frame folks who didnt deal well with people. Soon after the Liebert install, I got called to solve their power quality issues. The primary power for the building came from a 2 phase power system that dated back to the early days of electric power generation. I have no idea what combination of equipment was used, but eventually it became sort of 3 phase power in some voltage range that was sort of near grid voltage. Any UPS company I talked to would initially come up to propose equipment but usually backed off when they saw the incoming power but eventually Liebert proposed a big UPS. If had lots of front-end filtering to clean up the power but ultimately if the power quality was too bad, itjust went into bypass mode where the incoming AC power charged the DC batteries and then the UPS discharged the batteries and recreated an AC waveform that had a tight frequency and voltage range. The DC batteries were gel cells wired in series to put out fairly high voltage fairly close to the output voltage. That may have simplified the electronics but a couple of bad batteries in a string meant the whole string would go into low voltage alarm.

The system worked great for about 6 months and then we got a call from Liebert that their remote monitoring indicated imminent battery failure. The batteries were high quality and had a 3 year guarantee. They came on site and very rapidly informed us that they needed to be changed out. There were lot of them and the UPS was in a basement with about a 6'6 ceiling in the back of the building. Every one of the many batteries had to rigged out of the UPS onto a hand dolly and dragged out the back of the building. Turns out that the inverter was in bypass mode most of the time due to crappy power input. This battery change out became standard operation procedure for several years until the mill electrical group grudgingly pulled in a new circuit off the utility grid and relegated the 2 phase to the mill system. We had 33 MW of hydro generation of which there was some two phase and it was slowly swapped out until a third party bought the then bankrupt mill complex, stripped the hydros off and resold the pulp and paper mills to one of their failing subsidiaries. Fairly quickly the new buyer made sure the two phase generators were rewound to 3 phase although I think 30 years later there may still be one generator that still supplies 2 phase to some ancient pumps.

Our distributed control systems for the pulp mill operations all had Motor Generator sets that were always isolated from the grid. As long as the motor side could run on dirty power, the generator side was isolated from the rest of the grid and clean power could be created.

One of the last projects I worked on before retirement was a chip manufacturer with an inhouse wafer fab facility. They were in an old city in Mass on an ancient power grid. Every time there was a hiccup in the grid power, the wafer fab would trip and it took a week to clean up the fab and get it back in production. They were going to install a UPS to cover the entire facility, but we ended up proposing a combined heat and power plant with a GE Jennbacher genset with 3 MWhr Tesla Megapack battery and very complex multimode controller that ran the entire facility on a minimum import from the utility. If the multimode controller had a hint that the grid might be ready to go out of spec, the CHP would island in matter of cycles and stay islanded until it was manually selected to resynch with the grid. It was a PITA to get everything tested out but the first power blip it caught paid for a big chunk of the CHP installation

My guess is with the new hybrid home power inverters and an appropriate battery bank that a homeowner could rig up a similar system were power normally flowed in from the grid but if the grid went of spec the system would island to the batteries. Obviously better if there was on site generation but it would definitely clean up the power. The problem is currently is that most of these multimode inverters in the consumer range are third world origin with sketchy support. Midnight Solar is supposed to be releasing a US designed and supported multimode inverter soon and a lot of folks are waiting for it. It is actually manufactured offshore to their spec to make it affordable. I could run my house that has Sunny Island microgrid Inverters and two big lead acid batteries but my power quality is good and my net metering plan is great so it does not make sense.

 

[gthomas785]

Cute... but all are way too small to handle our mains power. I'd have to reconfigure my panels and dedicate one of those units to each sub-panel.

You're drawing more than 36 kVA? Somehow doubt that most residential transformers are 25kVA or less

Anyway, I hope you don't have to go that route but they do exist and could be applied for specific items that are particularly sensitive to voltage fluctuations... Like LED bulbs

 

[Ashful]

The primary power for the building came from a 2 phase power system that dated back to the early days of electric power generation.

Very cool story. For some reason, I thought 2-phase power was unique to Edwardian-era Philadelphia, and perhaps only one or two other cities in the whole country (e.g. Hartford, Niagra). Almost no one ever used it, as wider implementation in 3-phase was right on its heels. I think the only municipal 2-phase systems today are some very old factories and commercial buildings in Philadelphia, stuff literally left over from the late 1800's.

... the incoming AC power charged the DC batteries and then the UPS discharged the batteries and recreated an AC waveform...

This is still how many commercial UPS systems worked, at least as of 2000 - 2005, when I was still dealing with 3-phase UPS's. More common than some might think.

You're drawing more than 36 kVA? Somehow doubt that most residential transformers are 25kVA or less

Honestly, I don't know. I can see my peak draw averaged over 15-minute intervals is around 13 kW, and that my peak/average over the little 3-hour window I can track on a per-second basis, is 1.5:1. So, maybe more realistically 20 kW on a 1-second scale, but backing that out to an instantaneous draw is not really possible. I was thinking more in terms of sizing it to the mains, which are 200A.

Anyway, I hope you don't have to go that route but they do exist and could be applied for specific items that are particularly sensitive to voltage fluctuations... Like LED bulbs

The PECO service tech was supposed to call me when they made the repair. I spoke with two different CSA's, who both told me the note is there to receive a call-back when the service tag was executed. But they made the repair earlier today, and I got no call. I will have to call them again tomorrow.

I believe I know the problem, a service tech described it to me 10+ years ago, and said they'd be repairing it. I don't think that repair ever happened.

 

[peakbagger]

The plant I worked at also had cellulose Floc plant which was basically finely ground paper. The Brown Company, the long term owner of the mill, developed the process. It was used for many products including food products like Kraft grated parmesan cheese to keep the granules from sticking. Most pills are made of it as its good carrier for drugs. Welding rod coating was made of it and it was also used as a bulking agent for dog food. Folks like to overfeed their dogs so most cheap dog foods add floc to the food as its indigestible. What goes in one end comes out the other Ralson Purian was a big client. The floc was made in large ball mills, basically rotating cylinders with steel balls in them with sheets of paper loaded in. They were driven by ancient 2 phase motors fed from the nearby hydro station. The plant ran up until the around the year 2000. At one point OSHA wanted the mill to upgrade the electrical switchgear as it was effectively spring loaded switches for several hundred HP motors. We looked around the world for a supplier of new gear and there was no one and most didnt even know what 2 phase was.

Eventually the mills owner decided they didnt want to make floc anymore and sold much of the business to Ralston Purina and they paid the mill to destroy most of the equipment. There was a specialty part of the business called Selectacel who made specially treated floc in small quantities, it was all very hush hush and only a couple of people knew the process. When the mill notified the customers that it was closing down the business most of them were desperate to keep it open as it was the only supplier in the world. Eventually one of the bigger customers was convinced to buy the process and the keep it going to supply their uses and the other customers. I looked it up on the web and its still available https://www.trademarkia.com/selectacel-72073652. Most of our paper sold by the ton, the Selectacel sold by the ounce.

Our employee training center was right next to the R&D labs and on occasion during a meeting there would be fresh pastries and baked goods during the breaks. The employees at the training could sample them and and one of the lab folks would be there with a clip board asking questions about how they tasted and things like mouth feel. Floc was used for people food, as like dogs, people cant digest ground paper. I missed out on when they made Flocicles, they apparently tasted like popsicles but didnt melt as quick. At one point diet bread was an emerging market. One brand used floc while another one called Less Bread used ground straw. In some of the advertising, Less bread made a selling point that they didnt use "sawdust" in their bread.