strange events

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OK we had a winds storm recently i have been staying at am american friends home. in Washington state. they lost power to only half the house 6 times in a row each interruption lasting 30 sec at regularly spaced intervals of 2 min as recorded by the datacom pfe recorder on the ups that was on the affected bus the second ups system had no loss of primary mains only the under-volt transfer events logged by both ups units are common those are correlated with the timestamps on data packets retrieved from Puget sound energy's scada telemetry on various primary re closer operations. the lineman that arrived while i was out getting a bite to eat was not able to recreate the loss of the service leg by manipulating the service drop feeding the premises. and he verified that all primary and secondary terminations were solid. i went through the premiss side lugs myself with a torque bar and verified all the lugs on the feeders and breakers were tight also when i returned. the entire electrical system in this home is new only a year old from the pecker head clean down to the last outlet in line. the feeder between the main service and the distro panel inside is 3/0x2 2/0x1 1/0x1 copper. length of the run between main and load center is aprox 57 feet in a 2 1/2 ridged pvc conduit.
the only section of the system that i can see having a fault is the aprox 80 feet of 1/0 overhead AL+alcsr messenger that composes the service drop or the pole pig itself as these are the only two components aside from the meter that have not been replaced since the home was installed on the lot in 1982. i may be mistaken about the pig that's roosting on that pole out front but its getting pretty rusty under the secondary lugs. and no pardon my french ohmes law doesn't change the resistance of aluminum wire is the same in free air or in conduit your not going to pull 200 amps or the 390 pse's load calc claims through a 1/0 al cable without a stupid amount of line loss i put a 100 amp load on that thing and on a recently calibrated fluke 117 dvmm i repeatedly get an 11 volt drop on L1 and 10 volts on L2 both are below the ucom min of 114v. the math puts the resistance of that wire at almost 1/8 ohm. a properly sized service drop should allow half the service load rating to be drawn without falling below 115 volts so someones load calc in the eng depart is a crock of horse bunk. you can draw 200A at 80 volts through 1/0 copper welding cable it will warm it up nicely but reliability wise 2/0 would be recomended
 

petersonra

Senior Member
Location
Northern illinois
Occupation
engineer
just a guess.

one UPS was on L1-N and the other UPS was on L2-N.

one of the phases tripped locally for some reason and reset after 30 seconds.
 
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readydave8

re member
Location
Clarkesville, Georgia
Occupation
electrician
OK we had a winds storm recently i have been staying at am american friends home. in Washington state. they lost power to only half the house 6 times in a row each interruption lasting 30 sec at regularly spaced intervals of 2 min as recorded by the datacom pfe recorder on the ups that was on the affected bus the second ups system had no loss of primary mains only the under-volt transfer events logged by both ups units are common those are correlated with the timestamps on data packets retrieved from Puget sound energy's scada telemetry on various primary re closer operations. the lineman that arrived while i was out getting a bite to eat was not able to recreate the loss of the service leg by manipulating the service drop feeding the premises. and he verified that all primary and secondary terminations were solid. i went through the premiss side lugs myself with a torque bar and verified all the lugs on the feeders and breakers were tight also when i returned. the entire electrical system in this home is new only a year old from the pecker head clean down to the last outlet in line. the feeder between the main service and the distro panel inside is 3/0x2 2/0x1 1/0x1 copper. length of the run between main and load center is aprox 57 feet in a 2 1/2 ridged pvc conduit.
the only section of the system that i can see having a fault is the aprox 80 feet of 1/0 overhead AL+alcsr messenger that composes the service drop or the pole pig itself as these are the only two components aside from the meter that have not been replaced since the home was installed on the lot in 1982. i may be mistaken about the pig that's roosting on that pole out front but its getting pretty rusty under the secondary lugs. and no pardon my french ohmes law doesn't change the resistance of aluminum wire is the same in free air or in conduit your not going to pull 200 amps or the 390 pse's load calc claims through a 1/0 al cable without a stupid amount of line loss i put a 100 amp load on that thing and on a recently calibrated fluke 117 dvmm i repeatedly get an 11 volt drop on L1 and 10 volts on L2 both are below the ucom min of 114v. the math puts the resistance of that wire at almost 1/8 ohm. a properly sized service drop should allow half the service load rating to be drawn without falling below 115 volts so someones load calc in the eng depart is a crock of horse bunk. you can draw 200A at 80 volts through 1/0 copper welding cable it will warm it up nicely but reliability wise 2/0 would be recomended
I don't think wire size is related to this problem, and probably neither is rust on the transformer. But I may be wrong.
 
yes ups #1 is L1-n the other is on L2 and line 1 went down the entire load that was on that bus in the building also shut off
but l2 and all loads on it stayed up this was not a primary line drop as that would have dumped the entire building
 
the line size has to do with the crap like the frig kicking in causing the lights in the building to dim on that leg and the he washing machine to cause the lights on the other line that it is on to pulse in step with the agitator this is without causing the oposit leg to rise so it is not a bad xo line also placing a 13 amp load on line 1 bus off a #12 20A mwbc with a distance of run of aprox 100 feet round trip L1-N or any other branch that is L1-N drops the voltage on that circuit to 111-12 volts
the same load on the L2 side of the same mwbc or L2-N circuit only drops it to 115v there is a 15A afci circuit with one recept on it directly below the dist panel i can place a 26 A load on this receptacle that is tied L2-N and the voltage holds steady at 114 this is 26A over about 3 feet of #14/2/wg but anything loading above 1 amp that is placed on L1 makes the lights on that leg briefly dim
 
also there have been some nasty spikes between L1 and N that have reached as high as 463 volts at some time in 24 hours using the min max avg function on my fluke 117 and on L2-N watched the same time with my second fluke 117 a peak of 477 in the same time frame this makes me think there is a possible issue with the pig
 

Sierrasparky

Senior Member
Location
USA
Occupation
Electrician ,contractor
Depending on the type of method used to deliver power from the transformer to your home , different things can happen.
If your home is served from a Trans down the street and those secondary lines are bare any fault on a individual 120v leg of the 120/240 secondary of the transformer could be the cause of your outage/spike.
 
nothing bare lines are wired directly to the pig set up is as follows house affected one side of street neighbor house on other side pig sits on pole at street both houses use overhead feeder drops and are spliced to 2/0 copper whip that is bolted to lugs on pig pig is a 25 kva my math tells me that is only 144A per leg on capacity both homes have 200A service
 

RichB

Senior Member
Location
Tacoma, Wa
Occupation
Electrician/Electrical Inspector
Almost sounds as if there was a fault that caused the substation to open the line then reclose three times---'Scratching my head'-- but IIRC that should affect both lines not just one and wouldn't it stay open if the fault wasn't cleared after the third try??--huh interesting!
 

GoldDigger

Moderator
Staff member
Location
Placerville, CA, USA
Occupation
Retired PV System Designer
I would think that a recloser could be set up to operate on one line only, unlike common trip breakers, since the utility would not necessarily want to interrupt both sides of the line when only one faulted.
That possibility would depend on just how the two lines to the house were supplied and where the circuit protection was located. If the 120/240 came from a single transformer with a center tap, then the interruption would have to be on the secondary side.
 
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thats my point exactly its a 7.2 kv primary taken from one phase of a 7.2 open delta and this tap is fused at the trunk line it taps. the pole pig is a 7.2-120/240 25KVA the secondary is L1/XO/L2 XO is bonded to the primary neutral as is the drop neutral
 
ps im a bit cross this morning i was rudely awoke by the tvss and my little sisters macbook pluged into it releasing the magic smoke around 2 am
eaton is going to be getting a call later those home tvss units they sell are crap this home has two of them and neither of them will kick in untill the rising spike reaches 1kv L-L 550L-N
both apc ups systems also vented the magic about 10 min later and im going to have to look in my gear bags for some fuses for my flukes those took a duster when their 500v limit was exceeded by this spike last powechute tememetry reading from the apc units before they faulted was a priority overvoltage avr shutdown flag and a measured line in of 612 volts after that the last ten corrupted datapackets they sent were all 999 avr fault
 
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this my friends is why i advised the homeowners to unhook all non critical systems at night the apc ups systems did their jobs and saved the datacom rack and the telcom rack as well as my company laptop the line event logger in the main distribution panel 20 feet away didn't fare so well i may be sending that back to Agilent ill see what i get off the sd card in it in a bit
 
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replaced lead set on Agilent logger and it works again no other damage in building but these ch2 ultra whole home tvss units are dubious.. they look unscathed and the 50A dp they are on was not triped so i can only assume they did not clamp menaing the 550 L-N clamp rating is a laugh
im going outside with my quick stow hotstick and giving that pig a poke in the ass something is way off in there to give random spikes like this
i love the canned replys you ger from pse about this they always say the pig either works or doesn't but under the works listing is works but has random millisecond insulation failures at various places along the primary hv windings that cross to the secondary for oh so short a moment and introduce a nasty surprise into whatevers hooked to it
 
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Little Bill

Moderator
Staff member
Location
Tennessee NEC:2017
Occupation
Semi-Retired Electrician
OK we had a winds storm recently i have been staying at am american friends home. in Washington state. they lost power to only half the house 6 times in a row each interruption lasting 30 sec at regularly spaced intervals of 2 min as recorded by the datacom pfe recorder on the ups that was on the affected bus the second ups system had no loss of primary mains only the under-volt transfer events logged by both ups units are common those are correlated with the timestamps on data packets retrieved from Puget sound energy's scada telemetry on various primary re closer operations. the lineman that arrived while i was out getting a bite to eat was not able to recreate the loss of the service leg by manipulating the service drop feeding the premises. and he verified that all primary and secondary terminations were solid. i went through the premiss side lugs myself with a torque bar and verified all the lugs on the feeders and breakers were tight also when i returned. the entire electrical system in this home is new only a year old from the pecker head clean down to the last outlet in line. the feeder between the main service and the distro panel inside is 3/0x2 2/0x1 1/0x1 copper. length of the run between main and load center is aprox 57 feet in a 2 1/2 ridged pvc conduit.
the only section of the system that i can see having a fault is the aprox 80 feet of 1/0 overhead AL+alcsr messenger that composes the service drop or the pole pig itself as these are the only two components aside from the meter that have not been replaced since the home was installed on the lot in 1982. i may be mistaken about the pig that's roosting on that pole out front but its getting pretty rusty under the secondary lugs. and no pardon my french ohmes law doesn't change the resistance of aluminum wire is the same in free air or in conduit your not going to pull 200 amps or the 390 pse's load calc claims through a 1/0 al cable without a stupid amount of line loss i put a 100 amp load on that thing and on a recently calibrated fluke 117 dvmm i repeatedly get an 11 volt drop on L1 and 10 volts on L2 both are below the ucom min of 114v. the math puts the resistance of that wire at almost 1/8 ohm. a properly sized service drop should allow half the service load rating to be drawn without falling below 115 volts so someones load calc in the eng depart is a crock of horse bunk. you can draw 200A at 80 volts through 1/0 copper welding cable it will warm it up nicely but reliability wise 2/0 would be recomended

No offense meant, but this post is extremely hard to read.

Could you break it up some in the future?

With line spacing and paragraph spacing?

I didn't have to have all the spaces in this reply but did it to show you it is easier to read.
 
since they have been called to this place numorus times for this and other issues in the past 13 years these homeowners have lived here. and theres the part that says look up the public utility commisions office and raise holy hell about it before this gets to far out of hand and someone in one of the houses id maimed or killed because of the stupidity of the utility company and their preoccupation with replace it when it fails and you cant use the works or dosent work line to sweep it under the rug
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ps im on vacation visiting my friends in America but that does not mean i wont try to fix the sink if its working improperly so to speak:rant:
 
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this issue is out of hand the next pse employee i see when i am out and about is going to be drafted on sight and i will be breathing down his or her neck the entire time they are looking over this equipment they all claim is working properly.. .. i take the safety of my friends and my coworkers seriously and this issue is not one i am taking lightly.
 
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