OK....I'm done. Way off the OP post, and we could spend all day talking about specific situations. I'll answer your one question about one customer. We size transformers by number of services that are shared. Each service is considered 80% of panel rating. Additional customers on the same transformer add up to total possible load on the transformer. If it gets too close to transformer rating, we put on a recorder and check loads. If actual load is close to max, we set another transformer and split the loads. I can't speak for other utilities, but this seems to work for us, so we won't likely change. Here in the Tahoe resort mountain area, we have MANY second homeowners, so if a transformer is fine most of the time, ski season or 4th of July is a whole different story. Everybody comes up, turns on the heat and fires up the hot tub. System load almost doubles! We do the best we can.
This has been a fun exercise but I'm retired now, so I'm trying to forget all this stuff so I can sleep at night.
I really like this forum, because as a utility guy, Code is probably my weakest point. Most of the time, we're exempt. But we are also the water utility, so all of our pump stations have to be up to code. Thank God, the other tech is a major code guy, so I lean (oops...leaned, now that I'm retired) on him a lot.
Thanks for all your input. I'll probably check back once in a while, but trying to remember all of the reasons we did the things we did is giving me a headache.
Thanks for all of your input . I've learned a lot, and just because that's the way WE do things doesn't mean every other utility does it the same way. Just cut 'em some slack. The field guys are NOT the ones who set poilcy, they're just the ones who have to try and explain it to the customer.
Good night.