Weird electricity

[Mugshot]

My wife woke me up early this morning. She had got up to go to the toilet and noticed a problem with the fish tank and couldn't suss out what it was. Anyway to cut a long story short there appeared to be, for want of a better explanation, less electricity coming into the house. Nothing had tripped, but a lot of the lights and things weren't working and those that were seemed to be at a reduced power. So, for example, the lights that would work were operating like a torch which needs new batteries.
After about half an hour of scratching my head and looking at the fuseboard as if I knew what I was doing everything kicked back up to full power. Anybody know what could have caused something like that?

 

[Fab Foodie]

Elves?

 

[Mugshot]

Santa?

 

[Inertia]

Have your checked to see if next door had any issues?

 

[jefmcg]

I'd guess it was a problem with supply, like a substation going off line. If you're curious, ring your supplier.

 

[Cycleops]

We get this a lot here. Nothing much to worry about just a reduced supply.

 

[Mugshot]

I'd guess it was a problem with supply, like a substation going off line. If you're curious, ring your supplier.

Well that would have been my guess but it was more the case that it was less electric as opposed to no electric, like someone had used a dimmer switch on the whole house, I've never known that before.

 

[biggs682]

It's ok your supplier will be charging you for reduced power instead of normal power for the duration , so it should be cheaper than normal electricity

 

[Colin_P]

Some hacker is bit coin mining with it.

 

[summerdays]

What sort of supply do you have? We have an overhead line .... but when it has problems it normally is more like a flicker effect than a constant drop. They have come out and replaced the faulty bit within a hour or two of being notified (though it usually takes a few months for us to twig that its gradually corroding. I think they changed to a better part this last time.

Our supplier (Western Power Distribution - and they cover a large area of the country), have a twitter account and are good at replying/giving information. Perhaps try contacting your power distribution company? (Not the same as the one you pay your bills to).

 

[screenman]

Keep a note of the date and rough time, and watch out for any faults on your electrical items. 12 years back we had a power supply problem that needed a cable repairing outside of our boundary, the workers who we looked after well told us to get ever item in the house checked by a company they used, this resulted in us getting many new white goods free, inclding a washing machine, fridge freezer, micro wave and some other bits.

Not saying anything like that could happen with you but you never know, I am sure if the guys doing the work had not told us then we would have been none the wiser.

 

[Mugshot]

What sort of supply do you have? We have an overhead line .... but when it has problems it normally is more like a flicker effect than a constant drop. They have come out and replaced the faulty bit within a hour or two of being notified (though it usually takes a few months for us to twig that its gradually corroding. I think they changed to a better part this last time.

Our supplier (Western Power Distribution - and they cover a large area of the country), have a twitter account and are good at replying/giving information. Perhaps try contacting your power distribution company? (Not the same as the one you pay your bills to).

View attachment 386116

That sounds like our sort of set up. We're Western Power too. We had something or other replaced about 12 months ago that was corroded. I've checked to see if there were any reported outages but there doesn't seem to be anything on that, but I will drop them a line and see if they have any extra info. Thank you for that

 

[Globalti]

Keep an eye on your appliances as some can be damaged by fluctuations, as @Cycleops and anybody who lives in Africa will testify.

 

[Bollo]

If I was still at my old work I could tell you specifically if it was a grid-level issue, but my money would be on something more local like a substation.

Grid brown-outs are quite major events, either caused by consumption in excess of system capacity (unlikely at the mo'), a generator failure or a big failure of distribution. If the system is pulling more than is available, the voltage can drop and the frequency becomes unstable (tolerance is +/-0.2 Hz on 50Hz from memory) which manifests itself as a 'brownout'.

I worked specifically on something called the 'balancing mechanism', which is the market that matches electricity demand with supply across the national grid in real-time as electrical energy cannot be effectively stored in large quantities, for the time-being at least.

Now if you want an explanation of the P142 electricity pricing mechanism........

 

[Deleted member 26715]

We had a similar thing at work many years ago, each morning we would come into the unit to find the boiler was not working, we had many engineers in trying to work it out to no avail. Eventually one suggested monitoring the electricity supply, they put some device on the supply & at 03:15 for 2 morning running the electricity spiked to around 400V instead of the usual 230-240V, the boiler was tripping out for safety. We reported it to the supplier who were absolutely category 100% sure it was nothing to do with them, strangely that was the last day it spiked & we never had a problem with the boiler again.