gar
Senior Member
- Location
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Occupation
- EE
120929-1133 EDT
Last evening I had a power outage at home. At about 6:10 PM the lights went out. About 5 to 15 seconds later power reappeared for 1 or 2 seconds. After this nothing. Went around to the neighbors and everyone was out. Talked to a person walking and she said her parents about 1 mile away were without power also. Then on her smart phone we looked at the DTE outage map. It was a large area. Implies a substation problem. Later I determined about 5000 customers were out.
Now I needed to get my generator from the shop and my son had his tilt trailer at home. So about 8 PM my son brought the generator to the house, and we established power.
Unfortunately I had just turn off the TED power monitor about a day ago. If it had been on I might have had a little more information on what occurred, but there is no battery backup on the MTU or RDU.
MTU is the Measuring Transmitting Unit. This is two current transformers, and the chip to measure voltage and power. Some day I will modify this to have battery backup.
The RDU, Receiver and Display Unit, receives data from the MTU displays the data, and ouputs data via USB to a computer.
My week old Smart Meter was blank with no power, and showed no problem when power was restored.
My experiments on my two upright freezers being monitored with Kill-A-Watt EZ meters had problems. The EZ meters are supposed to maintain data from the time of lost power until power is reapplied and continue collection from the prior accumulated values. This capability has worked in bench tests I have run before. But on my freezers in this power outage it is clear that the non-volatile registers were reset or modified, and differently between the two meters. Thus, the EZs can not be depended upon to solve the problem of power loss while doing an experiment. Relates to bad circuit design.
Power was restored at 11:45 PM last night. This morning about 9 AM the street signal lights in the affect area were on flashing red. By 11 AM these were corrected.
Prior to the last several years I have not experienced any power loss as a result of sub-station problems. Now in the past several years there have been four. I believe power system reliability is going down hill and I expect it to get worse. Everyone should have some local generator capability. When I drove around last night there were probably no more than 0.1% to 1% of the homes that had generators. Actually in my very local area there were about 4 generators out of 50 homes. Much better than other parts of the outage area. Some of the more expensive homes had no generators. In fact the most expensive homes had none.
The DTE outage map works very well.
.
Last evening I had a power outage at home. At about 6:10 PM the lights went out. About 5 to 15 seconds later power reappeared for 1 or 2 seconds. After this nothing. Went around to the neighbors and everyone was out. Talked to a person walking and she said her parents about 1 mile away were without power also. Then on her smart phone we looked at the DTE outage map. It was a large area. Implies a substation problem. Later I determined about 5000 customers were out.
Now I needed to get my generator from the shop and my son had his tilt trailer at home. So about 8 PM my son brought the generator to the house, and we established power.
Unfortunately I had just turn off the TED power monitor about a day ago. If it had been on I might have had a little more information on what occurred, but there is no battery backup on the MTU or RDU.
MTU is the Measuring Transmitting Unit. This is two current transformers, and the chip to measure voltage and power. Some day I will modify this to have battery backup.
The RDU, Receiver and Display Unit, receives data from the MTU displays the data, and ouputs data via USB to a computer.
My week old Smart Meter was blank with no power, and showed no problem when power was restored.
My experiments on my two upright freezers being monitored with Kill-A-Watt EZ meters had problems. The EZ meters are supposed to maintain data from the time of lost power until power is reapplied and continue collection from the prior accumulated values. This capability has worked in bench tests I have run before. But on my freezers in this power outage it is clear that the non-volatile registers were reset or modified, and differently between the two meters. Thus, the EZs can not be depended upon to solve the problem of power loss while doing an experiment. Relates to bad circuit design.
Power was restored at 11:45 PM last night. This morning about 9 AM the street signal lights in the affect area were on flashing red. By 11 AM these were corrected.
Prior to the last several years I have not experienced any power loss as a result of sub-station problems. Now in the past several years there have been four. I believe power system reliability is going down hill and I expect it to get worse. Everyone should have some local generator capability. When I drove around last night there were probably no more than 0.1% to 1% of the homes that had generators. Actually in my very local area there were about 4 generators out of 50 homes. Much better than other parts of the outage area. Some of the more expensive homes had no generators. In fact the most expensive homes had none.
The DTE outage map works very well.
.
