Whole House Main Power Draw

[SonsOfThunder]

[quote author="bobkatz"]I'm just an ignorant guy when it comes to mastering how to use this Prodigy board....[/quote]
A very ironic statement when taken out of context...:razz: :razz:

Cheers!
Charlie

 

[bobkatz]

[quote author="SonsOfThunder"][quote author="bobkatz"]I'm just an ignorant guy when it comes to mastering how to use this Prodigy board....[/quote]
A very ironic statement when taken out of context...:razz: :razz:

Cheers!
Charlie[/quote]

Cheers back, Charlie! Well, PRR is obviously the MASTER of this domain. I'll stick with what I do best

 

[matta]

I'm with Charlie, when I read that line I had quite a chuckle. Bob, don't let your clients know, Hah hah!

Cheers

Matt

 

[SonsOfThunder]

Bob,

I have your book, Mastering Audio. And I have to say, if I can learn just half of what is in there I'll be doing much better. Thanks for a great work in that book!! You also deserve a huge "Attaboy" for your campaign against the loudness wars. THANK YOU!

Charlie

 

[pstamler]

[quote author="bobkatz"]Cheers back, Charlie! Well, PRR is obviously the MASTER of this domain. I'll stick with what I do best [/quote]

And, indeed, he does do it best. Or at least, no one does it better.

Peace,
Paul

 

[PRR]

> 10kV 3-phase into transformer on the pole.
Secondery winding Y-connected, 230/400V 3-phase.

You have 400V (line-to-line) coming into your house????

And people think the USA is dangerous just because we all carry guns all the time.

With wide variations, US residential power is usually:

13KV 3-phase Y on main streets

13KV single-phase on side streets

pole transformer serves 2 to 4 houses

pole transformer steps-down 13KV to 240VCT 3-wire (two Hots and a neutral wrap)

CT is grounded at the pole and at the house

Hmmmm.... the pole transformer may be around 24KVA, or say 100 Amps at 240V. Yet mine feeds two "200A" fuseboxes and a third old-small house which may be "100A" fusebox. If we all used 80% of our fusebox capacity, there would be a 4:1 overload on the pole transformer. The utility company knows this won't happen. If all three houses were preparing large holiday dinners in the same hour, the load could approach 150 Amps in the pole transformer. This is "OK" because the tranny is so large that it won't heat-up a lot in an hour. The hour of high temperature shortens its life a little, but it spends 99% of its time running "cold" at say 7 Amps (my electric bill works out around 640 watts average).

> big loads such as heaters, stove etc. are connected 3-phase.
Outlets 230V singlephase.

You can have unbalanced load. 1/3rd of your 230V outlets are on the same leg of the 3-phase Y. Put every 230V load in the house on just those outlets. Room-heaters, photo-lamps, toasters. Your 3-phase Y could run with 30A/0A/0A, with 30A in Neutral. If the system was designed for 16A/16A/16A with zero neutral current, it would be unhappy. But that would be very unusual.

 

[Kit]

You have 400V (line-to-line) coming into your house????

Yep, no problem. Inside the house 400v is hidden in the walls, behind the stove etc, so its pretty much untouchable. It´s standard though to have a 3-phase outlet in the garage.

I must say i dont get this fear off "high" voltage. 120V across the chest is plenty enough to stop your heart. :sad:

Oh, and correction on the stoves. Thats actually one thing in a Swedish house that might be 2-phase connected.
There are both 2 and 3 -phase models. It slipped my mind.

BTW. are you bound by law to have ground fault breakers in your house in USA?

Over here we got 30mA for human protection and 300mA for fire.

 

[PRR]

> i dont get this fear of "high" voltage.

I have exposed bare wires on glass knobs in the space above my kitchen. This is how we did it 1880 to 1920. Mine is not in use, but a lot of that stuff still is.

In this house, in my last house, and in my father's house: wiring is rubber insulated inside a spiral steel flex-shell. And after 40+ years, the rubber is rotten and brittle. If you move a wire, it shorts to the spiral-shell. If the steel is grounded, it blows a fuse. But steel rusts and the "ground" is not reliable. This has given lots of trouble, including "hot" switch-covers.

Most new wiring is good plastic insulation, and mostly plastic outlet/switch boxes, and mostly reliably grounded. The hot may make poor connection (a lot of fast-wire stick-in connections that don't really grip), but "live metal" is now unlikely.

But that old stuff won't go away. Except when they knock-down a perfectly good old house to put three new houses on the same land.

> are you bound by law to have ground fault breakers in your house in USA?

Only in bathroom, kitchen, and within 5(?) feet of dirt or concrete. Almost always GFI in the outlet, not the main fusebox. And only in the last 20 years, retrofitting not required unless you are doing a major rip-out or addition. I'm not required to have GFI anywhere in my house, because nothing has changed since 1972 and really since 1948. (I actually have at least 6 GFIs.)

I think the long-term cut-out on a GFI here is 5mA, not 30mA.

> 120V across the chest is plenty enough to stop your heart.

Maybe, maybe not. Edison picked 100V because he found few dead workers around his 100V machines. Many-many people survive 120V shocks. If you "must" electrocute somebody, you have to go far beyond 120V to kill reliably (as Edison found to everybody's horror). Even with our stupid wall-plugs, which encourage prong-touching, we don't get a lot of simple electrocution deaths.

> correction on the stoves

I was thinking that 3-element cooking was awkward. Small cookers logically run a single element per oven or pot. If it is taken from two legs of the Y, the unbalance is not large, you use 2/3 of your feeder capacity.

 

[mcs]

[quote author="PRR"]You have 400V (line-to-line) coming into your house????[/quote]
Yes, and 25A on each phase (in my house - some have more though). The outlets are all protected by 10 or 13A fuses (or 6A in old houses). In my house I think they just switched to 10A fuses and kept the old steel/rubber/cloth wire from the 6A days...

Many-many people survive 120V shocks.

Yes, and many-many people survive 230V shocks also. My electrician uses a finger to locate the phases...

Best regards,

Mikkel C. Simonsen

 

[Kit]

My electrician uses a finger to locate the phases...

Couldnt affort a DMM, eh?

I sometimes get zapped (thumb to pinky) at work when messing about in live fuseboxes.

It stings pretty bad, but it wont kill you.

Wake´s you up on monday mornings...

 

[Freq Band]

For all the help Bob has given the rec community, I'll volunteer to source a genny from here, California, put it on skateboards, dress up as Ready Killowatt, and push it to Florida. :wink:

=RR=

 

[bobkatz]

[quote author="Freq Band"]For all the help Bob has given the rec community, I'll volunteer to source a genny from here, California, put it on skateboards, dress up as Ready Killowatt, and push it to Florida. :wink:

=RR=[/quote]'


Wow! Well, this Prodigy community is new to me and I'm leaning on it for help. Many thanks back!

BK

 

[bobkatz]

Well, guys, sorry to resurrect this power thread... I read all the audio threads and mostly just follow, but this generator thing is still an albatross around my neck.

Installing the LP gas line triggered an electrical inspection by the town. The guy was your typical town bureaucrat electrician and he found a number of "violations" that I can easily fix but the one that really gets me down is that he says my practice of having reduced my 200 amp service by running it through a 100 amp breaker is no good. I did that because the automatic transfer switch is a 100 amp switch. Even though the generator is only 65 amps he says that's ok because it's a temporary power source.

He says that I will have to provide a "survey" by the NEC that shows that with the appliances in my house and the square footage that it will not exceed 100 amps. He says if I turn the dryer and the washer and the heat and A/C and hot water on it will exceed 100 amps. Well, I say, that's none of their business. Is he going to get me on the code or do I have any defense? I don't even know where to find that survey form, but I haven't done any looking yet. I still measure between 20 and 30 amps per leg with a normal load on the whole house but he said that has nothing to do with it.

Pain in the ass. If this whole things pans out I'm going to have to eat a $1000 or $2000 in my current investment with a new switch, distribution panel and all.

BK

 

[SSLtech]

Bob,

I'm currently sicker than 'sick Mick McSick' and I've been confined to bed for the last 4 days or so, or I'd be round to have a look at it with you...

What are the power (current) ratings on the major appliances (Hot water heater, A/C, dishwasher, drier, Perhaps even figure the auxiliary (emergency) heat separately if things get tight...

How can square footage influence the excess (or otherwise) of 100 Amps, I wonder?

Let me get this straight... You've safely fused your incoming service down in max. draw rating, and they're claiming it's unsafe???

:?:

Keith

 

[bobkatz]

[quote author="SSLtech"]Bob,

I'm currently sicker than 'sick Mick McSick' and I've been confined to bed for the last 4 days or so, or I'd be round to have a look at it with you...


[/quote]

Dear Keith: I'm sorry. I hope you come round when you come round!

What are the power (current) ratings on the major appliances (Hot water heater, A/C, dishwasher, drier, Perhaps even figure the auxiliary (emergency) heat separately if things get tight...

According to the town tech, I have to provide some kind of an NEC-style "survey" that either discusses "typical" consumption or else I have to read the nameplate consumption, I don't know which yet, I haven't investigated. I have six months to comply.

How can square footage influence the excess (or otherwise) of 100 Amps, I wonder?

Included in this "survey" is a line item that is a calculation, I understand of so many watts per square foot of living area, for lights, heat, etc. This is probably some concoction of the "make utilities rich" committee than real life. Some rule that says that you have to provide a service entrance for a house based on the typical consumption.

Let me get this straight... You've safely fused your incoming service down in max. draw rating, and they're claiming it's unsafe???

I have safely fused down the incoming service to accomodate a 100 amp transfer switch, and they are saying that the service itself (100 amp) is inadequate for the house as the house originally had a 200 amp service and there was a technical reason for it, or rather, an official reason for it. I say that 200 amps is overkill, I don't know what to say, I have to figure out what this "survey" is that they're asking me to provide.

It strikes me as b.s. I literally asked him if I turned everything on and I measured and if I proved it doesn't exceed 100 amps if that would meet their requirements, and he said, literally, "no." What counts according to Seminole County is what the NEC survey says "should be allowed" for a house of such and such size and such and such appliances. That's how I understand it at this moment.

This could mean tragically a tremendous amount of work lost on my part and the necessity to install an expensive new 200 amp switch and rewire it and more, since I moved the airconditioners already to a new sub panel controlled by the 100 amp switch.

BK

 

[bobkatz]

[quote author="mediatechnology"]So Bob why don't you tell them that you're converting all your heating appliances to LP?

There are some things in the code about the number of outlets and ampacity based solely upon square footage. Not sure you going to be able to fudge the sq ft though.

You were going to convert your air conditioning to gas too weren't you? :wink:

We have them here occasionally.[/quote]

Hi, Wayne. I was thinking about fudges like that. As soon as I figure out what kind of a form we have to fill in we'll see. But if they decide to inspect and find discrepancies, then what hole do I crawl into?

 

[bcarso]

I HATE bureaucracy. HATE HATE HATE.

I just went through a series of inspections by various agencies in my apartment. In previous years one zealous inspector made me get rid of all two-wire extension cords, regardless of loads and capacity---assured me that they started fires and were no longer legal in multiple-unit dwellings.

This time I was around for the inspection and I had a lengthy checklist to follow before the blessed days of visitations. Anything that might conceivably give cause for alarm I packed away.

Instead of a hardnose petty bureaucrat I got a string of amusing and generally very friendly characters. The termite inspector was a part-time poet; a Hassidic-looking trio (yarmulkes etc.) had one rather heavy-set individual (who had a hard time getting down the bookshelf-lined entry hallway) asking where he could get a library card; the electrical guy just checked the smoke alarms* and under the sink for the integrity of the disposal connections. All in all my preparations this time were total overkill.

Yes, I'm sure that once in a while they walk in to a conflagration-in-training, where abject ignorance and sloth are conspiring to truncate the gene pool. And since I am renting under an agreement into which I freely and noncoercively entered with the owners, I follow their directives.

But the point is, you just don't know. And this is the essence of the game: the capriciousness, the government of men and not laws. There's a choice quote somewhere from Rand about dictatorships that applies.


*This one always amuses me. They press a button and it makes a beep and they declare it functional. I could point out to them that they are only testing the built-in test mechanism---but of course my objective, generally, is to reduce the time of the invasion. Since I don't smoke, let alone in bed, and am a rather light sleeper at that, the likelihood of my life being saved with the alarm is relatively small anyway.

EDIT: I thought of another amusing one---when I was assured by the guy changing the outlets in certain zones that I was now protected against electrocution by the safety-ground-fault interrupting outputs when, for example, drying my hair. I didn't point out that the efficacy of these contraptions was null when a two-wire appliance was used. Again, the trick is to get these people out, as expeditiously as possible.

Bob---even if tempted don't try bribery---not that I think that you would, but we can be driven to strange things when up against it. The results could be highly counterproductive.

 

[bobkatz]

I HATE bureaucracy. HATE HATE HATE.

Oh, I may need a lawyer. I was thinking about bribing the guy but I'd end up in a Seinfeld episode, I'm sure.

Thanks for the comisseration. Stand by for more, once I research that danged survey.

In my old apartment in New York, when the super installed a smoke detector he would light up a cigar and blow some smoke to make sure it was working!

BK

 

[SSLtech]

Bob, I know that Niels K (who also posts here infrequently) has researched a few things to do with electrical code compliance in this area; perhaps he could enlighten us.

-If -for example- it's a survey which you have to have a licensed electrician undertake, I'm sure that some are friendlier than others...

Keith

 

[bobkatz]

[quote author="SSLtech"]Bob, I know that Niels K (who also posts here infrequently) has researched a few things to do with electrical code compliance in this area; perhaps he could enlighten us.

-If -for example- it's a survey which you have to have a licensed electrician undertake, I'm sure that some are friendlier than others...

Keith[/quote]


Aha! Good idea! I know a few friendly electricians...