Thursday, December 24, 2009

On, off, on, off , on, off and on again

My friend Pete reminds me that Spain, like the rest of Europe is on nominal 230v not 240v as I stated in a previous post. With an allowable variation of 10% either way that means that the supply voltage could be anything from 207 to 253 volts so when the voltage dropped to about 208 the other day triggering the alarm on my UPS, it was still within permissible limits.

Even still, if you look at that graph you can see how the voltage dropped by 20volts in the half hour period between 5:45 and 6:15pm.

Yesterday we had a series of very short power cuts one after the other which put our digibox into a funk. Probably because it had stopped, and restarted so many times within a few minutes it didn’t know where it was so I had to restart it properly to bring it back to life.

1 comment:

Pete said...

You certainly are getting some variance there! I forget how lucky I am here. As a city dweller within 15 miles of a 2 Gigawatt power station we're generally blessed with very, very stable power.

It's only when you watch documentaries about Britain's power infrastructure that you realise what a knife edge we're all on.

Even so, whenever I plug the PAT tester in when I'm in work I see a spot on frequency and never more than a 4V deviation from 240. Let's hope it stays that way!