Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

Electronic meters (of which smart meters are a subset) can react strangly on distorted currents, depending on the sensor (shunt resistor, Hall, Rogowsky coil). See the research from the Technical University Twenthe. All within the borders of the laws governing measurements for billing. Wim

Yes. UK HT distribution is all lines are hot and three of them. Neutral is derived as the centre tap at the step down transformer.

Very large villages do have a full sub station and all three phases present but I only discovered comparatively recently that my village has just two out of the three phases. This arose out of walking the cable routes when we had an MFU with no power for days (thanks to Northern Powergrid's inadequate maintenance and storm Arwen).

In rough terms where I am there are two full 3 phase spines carrying mains at 33kV running north south and the spurs come off that.

There is a slight difference in appearance of most poles. Convention here is horizontal mounted is HT and vertical mounted consumer mains.

2 phase .__. you have to be quite close to see the difference.

It is also confirmed by the fact that if a single phase goes down we some some very strange voltages.

If it was one driven phase and neutral then it would be all or nothing.

It's in the U.S.

I could see both ends of the break. The entire bundle of wires is one of these:

Note that the neutral is also known as the "Grounded Conductor", and it is tied to earth at the service entrance. This would explain why the two 120VAC legs in the home would still look balanced as they'll use the earth directly rather than indirectly through the grounded conductor from the pig to the service entrance.

We don't have tea time in the USA, and we're un-manageable anyhow.

I'm sipping Peet's French Roast now. They will have to pry that out of my cold dead hands.

That happened to me once. We had 90 and 135 vrms on various outlets. The PG&E guys didn't want to believe me but I finally convenced them (some of the lights were BRIGHT) and they fixed a splice on the wires outside.

That's weird because neutral here is usually multiply earth grounded too.

I'm working on a photo album of hideous poles and wiring in San Francisco. I'll post a link eventually.

Telecom contractors get-away-with a lot .. - power company - less so . John T.

Yes. Comcast makes insane messes and doesn't care.

Can't wait for 6G or 8G or whatever, no wires.

Nice. I can see where a crowded city like SF would end up like that. I live in an exurban "neighborhood" of 1- and 2-acre lots, carved out from cornfields just after WWII.

The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.

Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT

If I try http instead of https:

Connection denied by Geolocation Setting.

Reason: Blocked country:

The connection was denied because this country is blocked in the Geolocation settings.

Please contact your administrator for assistance. WatchGuard Technologies, Inc.

(top posted for Brian)

I've got a bunch of devices intended for the US market which will run on

Which won't work in the US anyway because the standards are different.

Andy

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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