Power Cut

[nowty]

Heard a large clunk around an hour ago, oh, that will be my grid disconnection relay kicking in because of a power cut. One of those classic times I love when the streets in darkness except for me. Done the usual thing of turning all the lights in and out of the house on.

Both house and car batteries are full, solar forecast for the next week on overload and my solar PV inverters still work with the grid disconnected, so I should be OK till around October.

DNO is indicating wont even be on site for another hour.

[Oliver90owner]

All your lights blazing brightly -‘naughty-but-nice’!

The last time I used my diesel genny (4 1/2kVA) during a power cut, I dared not run it at its full 3000rpm. It was around 2300h and everywhere else was sooo dark and quiet! I only needed some lighting to see to finish off a car repair that night … and the genny stood out in the open.

[Joeboy]

This should have been on Nowty towers v's Grid? Another win for Towers! I like 'should be ok until Oct'.

[Stinsy]

Had COVID gone differently your off-grid capability might really have paid dividends! Imagine if large proportion of DNO employees had been sick or even scared to come to work. The sort of outages that take a few hours to restore power now could have taken days or weeks.

My setup isn't nearly as good as yours but can work in a pinch. I'd have to manually throw the DP isolator, then connect to the inverter's own wifi and select off-grid mode. I'd have to notice that power was back on and reverse the process manually. So not worth it if the outage was less than a few hours.

My inverter has a "UPS" output so I could wire in a 2nd consumer unit for the lights, boiler, fridge/freezer and a few sockets, but I don't think it's worth it because the grid where I live is pretty reliable.

[nowty]

Had COVID gone differently your off-grid capability might really have paid dividends! Imagine if large proportion of DNO employees had been sick or even scared to come to work. The sort of outages that take a few hours to restore power now could have taken days or weeks.

My setup isn't nearly as good as yours but can work in a pinch. I'd have to manually throw the DP isolator, then connect to the inverter's own wifi and select off-grid mode. I'd have to notice that power was back on and reverse the process manually. So not worth it if the outage was less than a few hours.

My inverter has a "UPS" output so I could wire in a 2nd consumer unit for the lights, boiler, fridge/freezer and a few sockets, but I don't think it's worth it because the grid where I live is pretty reliable.

My SMA whole house backup system was a nightmare to install, difficult diagrams and instructions to follow, I almost gave up with it but got there in the end and its completely automatic.

The power came back on after about 3 hours, but there have been two more shorter outages of a few minutes, one in the middle of the night and one this morning. I saw the DNO's van still parked opposite the transformer this lunchtime and I notice this evening the lamp post outside my house is currently off so I think there is still a problem.

[nowty]

We had another power cut about an hour ago, it was only for about 2 mins but these regular annoying incidents normally kick out your internet, sat tv box, etc. This can interfere with your seamless digital media life as it can take several minutes for routers, cable modems, etc, to re-boot and re-connect.

I am watching the Olympics on BBC1 so via the freesat box and also internet surfing on the PC, and SWMBO is watching other Olympics streams via the laptop.

Now my whole house backup, although it is fully automatic, it does purposely fully disconnect us from the grid and only puts the power back on in Off Grid mode after about 2 or 3 seconds.

So, as not to lose the digital connections, I use two small APC UPS's so the cable modem, router, freesat box, home phone, HDMI repeater, NAS, and PC all keep running as if nothing has happened. They will only run for a few minutes without external power but as my power is always back on via the whole house backup in a couple of seconds, there is no problem.

[Stinsy]

I have an APC UPS that runs the router, NAS, and CCTV cameras for about 2.5hrs.

Lots of people hack them with bigger batteries. Eg mine came with 2x 12V 7Ah lead acid batteries, 110Ah batteries would dramatically improve runtime. The only downsides are: they’re not designed to run at full capacity for more than a couple of mins so you need to derate accordingly, they take a very long time to charge a bigger set of batteries, there is a 24/7 additional load.

This is the one I have:

https://www.ebuyer.com/704438-apc-back- ... s-bx1400ui

[nowty]

Don't know what's going on with the power around here, after the power cuts a couple of weeks back, we had another short outage last week and 2 hours outage last night, followed by another another hour outage this morning.

If I didn't have my house backup, I'd be going nuts.

But here at Nowty Towers, even with the power cut (and disconnected with a G99 relay), I was still getting the solar power, even if it was curtailed because there's no grid for the excess to go to.

[Stinsy]

Have you figured out the reason for the power cuts?
Round my way we have one every few years…

[nowty]

Have you figured out the reason for the power cuts?
Round my way we have one every few years…

No, we used to have one outage typically once a year for only a minute or two. But now they are regularly occurring, typically once every two or three months and the power is sometimes out for hours. We have had cable faults in the local road because the road / pavement has been dug up at least 4 times over the past 2 years with a section of cable cut out and replaced. But the latest ones, did not result in any digging up anything.

We are in an area with a hell of a lot of house building going on so wondering if its something to do with connecting all the additional houses up as there might be reinforcing works going on in order to facilitate all the extra connections.

When I installed my latest whole house backup, I nearly did not bother thinking outages were too infrequent for it to be worth it, but now I am so glad I did.