Power Cut

[Stinsy]

Have any neighbours been brave enough to ask how you have power when they don’t?

[nowty]

Have any neighbours been brave enough to ask how you have power when they don’t?

Yes, a couple have noticed in the past but last night when I walked back to my house from taking the pictures, one of my neighbours was outside and asked, "Have you got power, ours has been off all day ?".

I replied, "I'm on batteries".

Then when I was entering my house, I heard his wife say, "Whys he got power and we haven't ?"

He replied in a laughing voice, "He's got batteries".

Then his wife replied back in a disbelieving voice, "He's got what ?"

I have a voltage display by my meter and I notice that whenever we have an extended outage, the voltage always comes back a few volts lower than normal. An hour later its risen a bit and by this morning it was back to its normal value. I first wondered if they had some sort of soft starting on the transformer after an outage, but then it occurred to me its probably everyone's fridge freezer coming on and running simultaneously having been off for so long.

Which then made me think about the future, when after a power cut when everyone's desperate to get their EV charged and they are all on together.

[Mr Gus]

Wife comes round to "borrow a cup of electrons"

[Stinsy]

A friend of mine had a "gas outage". I'd never heard of one before but I suppose the must happen. Anyway, shortly afterwards the power went out because everyone turned on their electric heaters and overloaded the transformer...

[Mr Gus]

Yet many will have a portable gas stove & cannisters, our wee camping gaz one burner unit fits in its blown plastic box under kitchen cabinets behind a kickboard, the small gas cannisters live there too.

Ideal placement & impromptu use.
(it's where I stick the cheap candles, a lighter, candle lighter wicks, et al in shoebox's too) ..good space for that sort of thing).

[spread-tee]

LPG bottles are really best stored in a ventilated space , leaks have a tendency to hang around and build up over time,

Desp

[nowty]

Several power outages for only a few seconds today but I find the short intermittent faults worse than a full prolonged outage as my automatic system disconnects and re-connects from the grid too often.

According to the DNO there is a large outage nearby, so I have decided to flick the grid isolator off and go manually OffGrid until the nearby outage is fixed.

Plenty of power in the batteries so I am still not turning the gas boiler back on.

[AE-NMidlands]

A friend of mine had a "gas outage". I'd never heard of one before but I suppose the must happen. Anyway, shortly afterwards the power went out because everyone turned on their electric heaters and overloaded the transformer...

It used to happen regularly to a colleague of mine who lived on a housing estate near the middle of a small town. Apparently the gas mains were badly laid and regularly got blocked by condensate (like some MVHR systems fail from flexible ducts blocked by condensate.)
Yet another reason to get pv with a battery. I'm amazed that some advice "out there" says batteries aren't justified!
A

[nowty]

The nearby fault was fixed by the evening so I re-connected before the cheapslot started.

But if it was a really bad long outage, the gas boiler could have been switched back on. And even with a much smaller battery it would be ok and have continued internet use too.

[nowty]

Quite a timely affair here today at Nowty Towers after all the black out talk, so I thought I would tag this onto the end of my previous power cut thread.

This is new, I received an automatic text message from SSE this morning telling me my power was out.



Really ?, A2A heatpumps heating the house, internet on, lights on, TV on and we are having breakfast, kettle, toaster and microwave working OK.


Lets check the grid, yes its dead.
But Nowty Towers has the SMA Automatic Whole House Backup.
https://files.sma.de/downloads/SI44M-80 ... -en-10.pdf



OK, lets check the SMA Sunny Island battery inverter, yes grid fault and external power was lost at 6:51 this morning.





Lets check the power flows, plenty of solar coming in and batteries are nearly full.
Keep calm and carry on.



Time for a stress test, both A2A heatpumps are running heating the house but there is still headroom even without the sun to run the GSHP but it does need a kick to start it. Wow, the lights did not even flicker when the GSHP came on, so that's 3 heatpumps operating simultaneously offgrid.
A new first for Nowty Towers, looks like I won't need to resort to the gas boiler just yet.



Just before midday a big clunk is heard as the G99 relay reconnects the grid after the Sunny Island has resynced with grid voltage and frequency. Having read the latest regs I'm going to have to rename it to "Island mode isolator".