David wrote:

I had a similar experience except this time with the power
company. I check my voltage regularly and several months ago, it
started varying widely over a day. It could go as high as 134
volts at times and then drop back to 122 or so. I called the
power company and they said they would check it out. They came
over and measured 124 volts, said it was in tolerance, and left.
I let it go for a few days and called again when the voltage was
132 volts. I mentioned that the voltage can change hour to hour
by 10 volts and that I knew that I did not have a high impedance
neutral since it was within a volt on each side. They came out
again and by then the voltage was back to 124. They tested the
neutral and it was fine and again 124 was in tolerance. Over the
next several days I created plots of the voltage over time. One
day the voltage seemed to waver between 128 and 132 volts for
several hours. I called again and said I have plots of the
voltage, but they insisted that THEY have to measure the voltage.
I checked the voltage while still on the phone and I said come
out now since I was reading 130. An hour later, they came and
measured 128 and said I had a problem. It was traced to a faulty
capacitor bank on the distribution feeder An actual engineer
called later to explain the situation and asked me to immediately
report future problems. For the last week the voltage has been
stable between 118 and 121. The company could have saved several
truck rolls if they just believed me or at least put a recording
voltmeter on the line. I think there is a built in assumption
that the entire public is technically illiterate and they treat
everyone accordingly.

Most of their employees are under trained. They are like the
marketing droids and are taught just enough to barely do their jobs. At
the first report they should have set up one of their loggers to track
the voltage for a couple days to a week. We had all kinds of power
problems at my last job. They wouldn't listen to me, and called the
industrial electrical company that designed and installed the wiring
when they had the plant built. Two goobers arrived a few days later.
They walked around, removing covers from breaker boxes and scratching
their asses. A couple hours later they put all the covers back and
admitted that they had no clue. Next, they called Florida power who set
up a three phase logger. Two days later they informed the owners that
all the neutrals were undersized, and that harmonics were causing the
problems. This was a well known problem when the plant was built, but
the 'Good Ole boys' who owned the company ignored it and followed the
long obsolete method of using neutrals that were 2 gauges smaller that
the lines, instead of the current two gauges larger to handle the
harmonics. Then they had the * 'Monkey Itch' boys back to pull new
neutrals all over the 120,000 square foot office and manufacturing
complex. They never did admit that they could have saved a couple weeks
of problems, or money to repair failed test equipment if they had
listened to me.


* http://www.antimonkeybutt.com/


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a Band-Aid™ on it, because it's
Teflon coated.