Today I am going to deliver and install
a new computer I have been building over the
past couple of weeks and I have run out of usable tittle-tattle from unhappy Council officers.
I have lost count, but I must have made in excess of 35 computers from component parts
in the past 15 to 20 years and this was the first to give me a problem. Every
time it was switched on the video output corrupted after a few minutes and it
was traced to circuit board damage. Naturally the supplier blamed me despite
the damage being under a removable cover and next to impossible to break, so that was £149 down the drain.
Luckily it was not running last Wednesday morning or it might have been
damaged again. While writing a blog my PC’s Uninterruptable Power Supply
switched from mains to battery which is unusual to say the least. Later I
discovered that my solar inverter had tripped out at the same time so I put a
voltmeter on the supply. 264 volts! The legal maximum supply voltage is 253.
I phoned UK Power Networks on 105 and they took the report quite seriously and
their van was on my drive within a couple hours. The voltage had dropped to 249
by then but the man saw the voltage log and said he would get a UKPN voltage recorder.
At the time I thought I was alone with the problems but I later heard of two TVs
that had gone off with a bang and someone who called UKPN was told his was
the 86th report from my road and the next one.
A stroll along the road in the early evening found various residents outside discussing their
electrical problems. Some had lost power completely and others said that their
consumer unit RCDs had tripped but the power was still there.
UKPN has since then been telling different callers slightly different stories. They say mine
is the only report of high voltage, it went up to 276 yesterday morning, and
seem to be unable to appreciate that most people have not got a house full of volt meters.
All they know and report is that something must be wrong.
It seems to be certain that a sub-station fuse blew
on Wednesday but some UKPN reports say there is a cable fault and something
underground is to be swapped out today.
The
fact that some houses lost power totally while others only suffered RCD
trips is probably explained by a UKPN engineer who said that the houses were not all
on the same phase supply from the sub-station. As far as I can tell, everyone
with solar panels has had their inverters trip off.
To hopefully stop my TV going bang I am running it from my
recently installed battery.
UKPN said the TV would be replaced if they damaged it but I don’t think they realise quite how expensive it was!