In article ,
Jon Elson wrote:

Pete C. wrote:

Ignoramus18851 wrote:


There are some intermittent problems at home related to me starting my
RPC. It is beginning to affect my marriagee.

1. A TV once turned off

2. At another time, our kitchen oven, where me and my son placed some
cookies to bake, went crazy and went into a cleaning mode and burned
the cookies.

I suspect that it is so because the main 10 HP motor takes a
comparatively long time (1-2 seconds) to spin up, and draws about 120
amps during this time.

I am considering adding some capacitance to increase its starting
speed, but would like to double check if this is a step in the right
direction. I would turn these caps off after the motor comes up to
speed.

thanks

i



Sounds like you have an excuse to upgrade your electrical service. The
problem isn't your RPC, that's a perfectly normal home shop item, the
problem is your inadequate electrical service.

Tell the SO that your glad the RPC has pointed out the potentially
dangerous deficiencies of the homes electrical service so you can
upgrade to 400A service before there is a fire or something.


Well, actually, that isn't so ridiculous. My dad remarried about 15
years ago,
and they were having problems in her house, with lights going out and then
coming back on later. I said that sounded serious, call your
electrician. The
licensed. professional electrician
said it was "normal, nothing you could do"! I said, "wow, you need a new
electrician!" My dad didn't want to believe me, then his next-door
neighbor,
who is an EE, agreed, in much stronger terms. Well, nothing happened until
I got a chance to visit. I pulled the cover off the electrical panel,
and many
of the wires were so loose in the breakers you could just pull them striaght
OUT! Yikes! So, I retorqued all the hold-down screws, and there were no
further problems. EVERY screw in the panel was loose.

This happened to a boss of mine in the 1970s, in the suburbs of
Washington, DC. He complained of weird interactions between circuits
that ought to be independent, which suggested bad ground to me. So I
visited his house one saturday. It turned out that the electrician's
helper had never gotten around to tightening all the screws down onto
the wires; nothing was tight. It worked at first, then the wires gained
a little corrosion.

Many years later I went to a summer stock theater that my kid sister was
in, held outside at a local school. While waiting for things to start,
in the late afternoon, I'm idly looking at the lighting setup (I used to
work theater lighting). Then I notice how *blue* the light from some of
the unfiltered stage lights seem. Blue? How do you do that - it takes
overvoltage. Hmm. They will have a three-wire 220-volt feed; the
neutral must be open. How else could this happen? So I went to the
director and asked him if he had been having problems with lamps burning
out too soon. Yes! Solid-state dimmers too. Expensive. And how did
you know? Tell blue story. We look at the cabling. Sure enough, in
one of the Edison connectors, the neutral was loose. Tighten the
screws. Director is very happy, because now he can prove that the
dimmers blew because of bad cabling supplied by the rental company, and
the rental company pays, not the director. Not exactly a damsel in
distress, but he'll have to do.

Joe Gwinn