>
> I have to agree with you, Ken. I found our voltage low last year, and
> checked several neighboring homes as well. When I found it to be a common
> problem, I called the utility company and had them check it out. They
> eventually found a faulty breaker in one of their capacitor banks, which
> caused a low voltage situation on one phase. When they replaced the
> breaker, all came back to normal. Fortunately, I did not lose any
> appliances.
>
Interesting. Those capacitor banks are quite necessary to reshape the
waveform. Instead of a nice rounded sine-wave, high load on your segment
will cause the lower voltage portion of the waveform to flatten to zero
leaving these nasty triangular spikes. If you place a FLUKE volt-meter in
your outlets, you'll see a proper voltage, but the RMS value is
substantially lower. Waaay lower.
About the only way to really be sure about your household power is to place
a FLUKE oscilliscope across the leads and examine the waveform.
This is a very common problem in areas where you have mostly residential,
but there is one small manufacturing plant running high-power electric
motors. During startup or under load, the motors are drawing so much current
that it alters the waveform. the peak-to-peak voltage remains proper for
everybody else, but 1/2 or more of the waveform get's flattened to zero with
all sorts of little noise spikes.
AG (Fluke rules!) Schnozz
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