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admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues

angryrobots posted:

That's also true, but not what STR is saying. He's meaning that if you lost a 120v hot leg on the utility side (or anywhere upstream feeding a panel with the 240v stove and other 120v circuits), the stove won't get 240v, but it could get ~some voltage~ via the bus bar that is missing it's leg, being connected to 120v circuits with devices plugged in and competing the circuit to neutral. So the stove circuit is being completed, but to neutral though whatever is plugged in.

In practice, most of the time when we deal with a partial power voltage complaint, asking "Does your stove or dryer work?" (assuming they are electric which most are, here) will reliably suss out whether they possibly have utility half-power (which we need to go deal with) or a problem on their side (ie- they have the receptacles in one bedroom out. You need to check your breakers and/or call an electrician).

I'm not saying he's wrong, cause he isn't, but I've not personally had a complaint of damaged electronics in a case like that, or had someone tell me their stove was "kinda working" when they had a completely open hot leg (I have heard that, when it wasn't completely open but just a bad connection causing voltage on one leg to sag with load). Though generally I don't enter a residence and I'm definitely not checking voltage at the stove. Lots of smoked electronics from open neutrals, as you described.

This is interesting stuff.

I had the experience of losing a leg sometime last year. For me about 50% of my house didn't have power for a few hours and that was it. Nothing was damaged. I have no 240v outlets or appliances, though - everything is gas for me.

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admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues

El Mero Mero posted:

I'm trying to get a sense about what's making our electricity bill so high. In general I tend to really hate all of the iot garbage out there, but I was curious about what folks in here think of something like Sense. Is this another one of those things that will break my poo poo and leave me in the dark when the power goes out or the company goes bankrupt?

I'm thinking of installing an IoTaWatt setup, an open power monitoring system similar to Sense but without the questionably-useful machine learning appliance detection or the need for a company to be alive and running servers in the cloud:

https://iotawatt.com/

admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues
You can also just try getting a $40 Kill A Watt and plugging poo poo into it and making a spreadsheet.

admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues
My supplier provides some nice graphs that help demonstrate heat / cooling cost vs average temp (day+night) in a month


Furnace positively dwarfs water heater + stove + range in the therms depot.


lol @ "WFH July" (it's been in the 90s most days)

admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues
This sounds like the sort of thing an electrician warned me about when I asked about having AFCI breakers installed in my old house (I'm scared of arcs via old cloth wiring and potentially bad hack jobs). He said electronics trip them "all the time" and didn't think they were worth the hassle/cost.

admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues

Blackbeer posted:

This is a good reason to have AF breakers. If the wiring causes an AF trip, you've got bigger problems than nuisance trips.

Yeah. I wasn't sure how much I believed him about AFCIs "tripping all the time for no reason" but I dropped the thread out of inertia. Probably time to pick it back up again.

Most of the wiring coming out of my breaker is modern-looking plastic. But a few (big, important) circuits are old cloth wiring, including the entire 3rd floor where my office and bedroom are. There's a lot of hot/neutral swaps (I've fixed some of them) and a number of "3 prong outlet with open ground" which gives me little confidence in the quality of the work. Really, I just want all of this old wiring ripped out and replaced, preferably without taking down all the walls (certainly not a DIY job for me). Could take a while to figure that out, though :(

edit: the electrician did replace some incorrectly-sized 20A breakers with 15As though... :sweatdrop:

admiraldennis fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Oct 9, 2020

admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues
Anyone seen this thing?

https://www.tingfire.com/how-ting-works/

It looks like some insurance company (not mine) has started giving them to customers.

I can't tell if it's a "slick marketing but barely actually does anything useful" or "actually pretty sweet" kind of product.

(Personal context: my beloved 125-year old house contains a mish-mosh of romex, cloth, and bx and I'm trying to figure out how bad the latter two really are / how much proactive rewiring to do. I'm not keen on tearing down all the plaster walls so everything new would be a fish job... I'm likely to have some older wiring for quite a while. )

admiraldennis fucked around with this message at 22:57 on May 5, 2021

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admiraldennis
Jul 22, 2003

I am the stone that builder refused
I am the visual
The inspiration
That made lady sing the blues

Sockser posted:

Another circuit is the outlet for my washing machine. That's it. Nothing else. gently caress you.

Lol. It's reasonable as others have described but I can relate.

I have a dedicated 15A for my bathroom vanity light. :) Not the overhead lights and fan (that's on a circuit with half of the other overhead lights in the house), not the GFCI plug on a combo panel with said vanity light switch (that's got its own 15A), just the vanity light with its LED bulbs and 15W draw. Much like your washing machine outlet, it's actually pretty sane in a world where one might have had non-LED vanity lighting and also wanted to run a hairdryer on the GFCI.

But, then, we have things like this:

#18 (15a)
Master Bedroom - all three outlets
Office - outlet on Bedroom side
Pantry - outlet on Kitchen side, not window
Lights:
Top of Basement Stairs
Kitchen
Pantry
2nd Floor Bathroom Ceiling + Fan
All 3rd Floor Ceiling Lights (3x bedrooms, hall, master closet)
3rd Floor Storage Lights

(#12 (15a)
2nd Floor Bath - Vanity Light!)

If it weren't for LEDs, that #18 would not be cutting it at all especially considering my use of window A/Cs. My main workstation PC is on it too! I used to have to remember to turn off the A/C in my bedroom before using the toaster oven in the pantry, until I found a new spot for the toaster oven. I have another circuit with a similar multi-room load. Both are delicate balances to keep under 15A in the summer.

admiraldennis fucked around with this message at 23:25 on May 5, 2021

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