Acceptable voltage drop from Poco?

Depends on what sort of work you usually do, if you're only only going to use it a couple of times a year, is it worth having? Might be, might not, just like any piece of gear. Like- why own a TDR if you'll use it maybe twice a year and can rent one when needed (not that the cameras are near that expensive).

BTW, $500 on 2005 is about $850 now.
 
Amazon has a few $200 ones. Don't know how well they work. FLIR starts at $500 and goes from there.
 
MAD MAN said:
I'm an electrician and have had trouble with my kitchen lights randomly flickering for a few years. New dimmer, new bulbs, had the wall open and everything was fine so I just pushed it off as interference with the LED bulbs as it randomly happens with no patten.

Was working in my panel the other day when they started flickering and decided to check voltage which I've done before but could never catch it at the right time. A phase was 117 volts and B was 121 with little load on my side and when I applied a 50 amp load to a phase my voltage dropped to 108. Looking down the street it appears to be a 50 kva transformer feeding a dozen houses.

Is this something worth calling the Poco about?
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The other thing is it is summer. So I would assume it was a POCO overloaded circuit. I would also ask them about any recent switching programs if this issue started recently. You could be at the end of the line on a circuit they swapped to for work. This happens more often than utilities let on. Weekend work configuration for feeder cable replacement and voltage gets low and some stuff starts cutting out on low voltage because they are feeding you from a substation on the other side of town.

More than likely, it is summer and their circuits are just overloaded in general. More people pulling more juice in the summer. They might be able to do a simple tap change 2.5% up or 5% up. Or as others suggested, they could have a bad splice at the weatherhead.
 
Had the power company out and they did a load test and applied a "huge load", A phase dropped to 115 and b to 118 with 239 between them as I'm standing there laughing because they thought that was bad and quickly turned the load off when I was running at 115 all morning and much lower the past few nights.

They ended up swapping the transformer which helped the voltage a bit but there gonna come back and add an additional transformer to the street. Since they replaced the transformer I haven't had any issues with my kitchen lights like I was but it's too soon to tell as it would go days without issue before but I had another lamp which is made from an old electric meter that would always flicker but at the same time the meter made a slight rattle so I assume the old meter was messing with the LED, no more flickering on that and the meter doesn't make the noise like before.
 
herding_cats said:
Amazon has a few $200 ones. Don't know how well they work. FLIR starts at $500 and goes from there.
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Even simple IR thermometer can be useful depending on what you are looking for.

Two connections carrying the same current should be about the same temperature if in same ambient if they are in similar working condition. If one is significantly hotter, it likely has problems.
 
MAD MAN said:
Had the power company out and they did a load test and applied a "huge load", A phase dropped to 115 and b to 118 with 239 between them as I'm standing there laughing because they thought that was bad and quickly turned the load off when I was running at 115 all morning and much lower the past few nights.

They ended up swapping the transformer which helped the voltage a bit but there gonna come back and add an additional transformer to the street. Since they replaced the transformer I haven't had any issues with my kitchen lights like I was but it's too soon to tell as it would go days without issue before but I had another lamp which is made from an old electric meter that would always flicker but at the same time the meter made a slight rattle so I assume the old meter was messing with the LED, no more flickering on that and the meter doesn't make the noise like before.
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Where were you measuring voltage with what you mentioned in OP vs where they were measuring voltage when applying said load? If they were at the meter socket with their test load and measurements but you were on load side of main breaker anything in between those two points (including the main breaker itself) could still be where the problem is.
 
ptonsparky said:
It doesn't take too long to recover the costs of a camera. Mine was $500 20 years ago. They've got to be better now. IDK about pricing?
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We have a couple of $5k cameras and one T640 that was $26k new.
The T640 can detect a hot spot on a connection from better than 200’
I use it to shoot our stations
For normal work where you can get relatively close to the connections a $300 one will work fine.
 
Hv&Lv said:
We have a couple of $5k cameras and one T640 that was $26k new.
The T640 can detect a hot spot on a connection from better than 200’
I use it to shoot our stations
For normal work where you can get relatively close to the connections a $300 one will work fine.
Click to expand...
I tried finding freshly downed, but lost birds once. Never worked. Now if we could borrow that T640...
 
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