Power Cut

[Moxi]

Deeply satisfying, good to hear its all working to if not slightly above expectations.

Lovely sunny day here and my batteries are getting a much-needed charge.

Moxi

[Stinsy]

How quick is the changeover?

Does the clock on your oven retain the correct time?

[Joeboy]

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".

That's brilliant! 'Oh I'm sorry, what did you say SSE? I didn't notice'.

[nowty]

How quick is the changeover?

Does the clock on your oven retain the correct time?

Its variable so I think the fastest time is 20 milliseconds which is typically as good as a UPS. But I don't want it to run as a UPS in case I am caning the grid at a 20kW draw and end up with another blackout. And I have separate small UPS units running the internet, sat box and main computer so I don't lose all that anyway.

So, I set the changeover to slow which is about 5 seconds. This ensures several WiFi sockets drop out from their active states so turns off things like GSHP, storage heater and hot water boost. Also I have another relay which piggybacks onto the G99 relay which cuts off the EV charger circuit. I can still charge the EV via granny cable if desperate.

So unfortunately I need to do 3 things,

1) Set the fecking clock on the oven , but its normally the first indication that the power has actually been off at some point.
2) Set the clock on the kitchen heated floor, but thats good as it effectively delays the floor coming on for about 6 hours.
3) Press a button on the micro chip reading cat flap which I believe Joeboy once ridiculed as being a 21st century problem.

[nowty]

That's brilliant! 'Oh I'm sorry, what did you say SSE? I didn't notice'.

Yeah there up your end of the country and down my end too.

[Joeboy]

That's brilliant! 'Oh I'm sorry, what did you say SSE? I didn't notice'.

Yeah there up your end of the country and down my end too.

So are the Tories, don't worry about it.

[nowty]

We had another 2x power cuts last night, both of about 30 mins duration, that's a total of 4 power cuts in less than a week. I was a little concerned on the first one last night as batteries were down to 50% and todays solar forecast is poor. But because it was only a short one, still managed to get a little back into the batteries on the cheapslot.

There were no txt messages sent to me but the first cut was shown on the local live DNOs power cut and covered quite a large area.

[Joeboy]

Power is off over here for maintenance works. The freezer HUGE cubes are doing their job as is the usb powered battery packs for phones and Internet. All doors open and a lovely breeze blowing through. Sandwiches for lunch, we ars absolutely golden!

[AGT]

We used to have loads of power cuts, Scottish Power turned up the other week, replaced all the wooden poles, ran new cabling etc so hopefully improved the reliability of the network in the village

Maybe petrol generator won’t get used so much.

[Oldgreybeard]

We used to have loads of power cuts, Scottish Power turned up the other week, replaced all the wooden poles, ran new cabling etc so hopefully improved the reliability of the network in the village

Maybe petrol generator won’t get used so much.

Made a big difference here when SSE did the same a few years ago. They replaced all the ageing poles and single conductors with new poles and ABC. Since then, instead of maybe a dozen power cuts a year we are now down to just three or four, none usually longer than a few hours.