On Sun, 29 May 2005 10:11:41 +0100, Jason Arthurs wrote:

snip

When the weather gets warmer we experience occasions brownouts, short
power outages (usually in the early hours between 4am - 7am) and
generally very poor reliability. Our domestic voltage varies between
240-250v, but usually hovers around 248v (as the over voltage alarm on
my UPS often complains).

Are you essentially in a quite rural location? Large village, hamlet, many
neighbours? You said you'd lived there for a couple of years, did you move
from an essentially urban location?

Your brownouts are short-duration interuptions, caused by transient faults,
usually something that causes the overhead wires to clash, tripping
automatic protection, but then clearing, so that the automatic switchgear
can reclose sucessfully onto the circuit. Like it or not, these are one of
the downsides of living in a rural location fed by an essentially overhead
network.

It would pay you to do some research yourself, if you can. Are there any
major rivers or lakes not too far away? Possible locations used by swans or
geese. These can frequently cause o/h circuits to clash, but once clear of
the wires, the circuits remain intact.

If you identify any such locations, sensibly not more than 2 or 3 miles
from where you live, take a quick look for o/h circuits in the vicinity. If
there are any there, just take a quick look to see if there is anything at
all fitted to the conductors. Bird flight diverters (BFDs) have been in use
for quite a few years now. They are often small helical coils that are
wrapped periodically onto the wires, the idea being that they make the
wires more visible to birds.

Another oddity I came across a few years ago, and we tracked it down more
by luck than judgement, was a whole series of auto-recloses that started
suddenly, went on for a few weeks, then stopped just as suddenly. Turned
out in the end to be a farmer who had turned a bull into a paddock and the
bull used to work himself underneath a staywire and use it to scratch his
back, causing the o/h's to clash.

What you should do is try to compile a list of how many outages occur over
a period of time. If you merely complain 'we seem to be getting lots of
outages' you won't really get very far. If you can say 'In the last four
weeks we've had 10 outages that occured at these times on these days'
you'll stand a much better chance of getting somewhere.

Our local provider is Midlands Electricity Board (npower?), is there
any point in complaining or will they simply tell me that everything
is within tolerance? Didn't EU harmonization mean our voltage was
supposed to be a maximum of 243.8v (i.e. 230v +6%)?

Nah, it was +10% - 6%, I think now it's ±10%. Soemone who is more up to
date than me with the latest regulations will pop up before long to
confirm.

--
the dot wanderer at tesco dot net