Monday, November 26, 2012

A result at last

As I have reported before, the voltage of our electricity supply has been fluctuating wildly for some time now. It caused the lights to flicker and lower and my UPS to go mad as it tried to even out the fluctuations.

What puzzled us though was, other people on our estate did not seem to be suffering from the same problem. Was it just our house?

The answer came last night when the electricity went off altogether. We could see that other parts of Villas Andrea were still lit up but that our street lights were all out and none of the houses had lights on.

Pam and I went outside to investigate and could hear our neighbours chatting about the problem in the street. Some minutes later, the electricity came back on. One of our neighbours explained that there had been a breakdown in a transformer that was only affecting our street and that now it was fixed!

Touch wood, since then the lights have been stable and my UPS confirms a steady 23 volts – let’s hope it stays that way!  

1 comment:

Bill said...

Interesting. I had a similar type of problem in my apartment here in Scotland for the first couple of years, with certain equipment failing to work properly or the power flicking out completely (no other apartment was affected, only mine). After many interventions by the builder's own electricians, with no success, except that I was encouraged by them to replace a couple of televisions (because they had been purchased abroad, long story) the local electricians in the town traced the problem, after two visits, to an incorrectly wired signal booster for the circuit carrying television signals to each room - the negative and positive wires had been wired to two different phases in the circuit box. This apparently caused a minor imbalance in the system and when certain equipment operated by timers flicked on (such as video recorders or the central heating) this was enough to disrupt the power for the whole apartment, or to cause it to 'wobble'. Perhaps it was something similar that caused your problem - I know little about electricity (beyond the basics), but from what I have been told this kind of problem, often caused by a minor mistake at the time a system is installed, is incredibly difficult to analyse and correct, because it is so subtle and of course because it is a problem the installing electrician has caused by a minor wiring error and I've found that one's own errors are often the most difficult to identify - it often takes a fresh pair of eyes. Since then, my electricity supply has been completely normal. Let's hope you'll have no more problems.