How do I verify that I have bad power?
I feel like the power in my room is awfull, fully functional equipment occassionally malfunctions for no apparent reason, my monitors make crackling sounds from time to time which they dont in other rooms.
Am I just schizo or could I have an issue with dirty power?
Check every termination on the wires coming to your room. 99/100 times it's a loose screw, wirenut or backstab connection causing a small arc. If it's a backstab termination remake it as a screw termination
>Am I just schizo or could I have an issue with dirty power?
Could be both. If I thought my power was bad, I'd plug my computer and monitor into a UPS. Also, we are watching you.
Could be shitty wiring. Old house, knob and tube wiring, bad connections. Could be a bad meter. You could get a voltage monitor and hook it up, it measures the supply voltage and will turn things off if it senses a problem.
If it were me, I'd hook up my oscilloscope. Downside: You need an oscilloscope.
Can I borrow it?
I've never hooked mine up to mains, that's too scary. I have looked at it after stepping it down to 9V and isolating it, though. Looks like a complete mess, barely like a sine at all.
... and that scope has to have FFT functions. Harmonics are destructive, especially to motors, but will not leave fluctuations that you see on handheld meters.
Disconnect all fuses and check incoming power, then switch on one fuse at a time and check. If the source of the problems are in your home, you will see where it is when you switch on that circuit.
You can get a line conditioner box but that will be like UPS and only work for what you plug into.
For cheaper than a scope, you could check voltage for <$10.
I had shitty power at my last house. Word from the power company via the neighbor was that we were on the end of the line and all of the McMansions being built in the neighborhood was hard on the local electrical grid set up for 2-3 bedroom houses from the 60s-70s. I watched if fluctuate between like 120V-125V at 3am on a cool night down closer to 110V on a hot afternoon/evening when everybody was home with their AC cranking. I started to notice on some nights certain light fixtures with a bad flicker, and me and my neighbor both had issues where the power would flicker off for a split second once every couple weeks and the AC compressor would stall out and make this horrible noise until it was cycled back on.
No idea what it would’ve looked like on an oscilloscope
I don’t know what other US anons get, but I’m pretty sure a 10V+ fluctuation isn’t great. Was looking at the old pics on the multimeter seeing what I actually caught at that house
…and a night pic late when people are in bed and the McMansion’s AC isn’t cranking as hard
I don't think you can see spikes on this, you need a sillyscope. My line is 114-126 though I've never actually seen it under 120.
Yeah I’m sure a scope would have looked a lot worse if I scoped it at 6pm-7pm on a hot evening.
You dont know what an oscilloscope is for, do you? It measures the sinewave to check if it is in sync. So if the waves arent too many degrees out of line with each other. Because if they are,then you get stuff like sensitive electronics breaking.
10% isn't too bad and doesn't have anything to do with 'dirty' power op shows that you would need something more sophisticated to measure.
only mericans seem to have these kinds of problems, i wonder why. plenty of power monitors, even a lot of UPS won't detect or fix high frequency imposed onto mains from shitty devices.
That isnt dirty power, thats normal voltage fluctuations due to increasing load. What OP means is the cosinus of the simewave being fricky in some way (for example due to solar panel power spikes or three phase power being out of sync). Magnetic fields from powerlines etc can cause issues too.
Oi vey. Don’t assume everybody is as dumb as you and needs 3 of the same posts saying voltage is not the same as a sine wave. Read the first post, for <$10 at minimum anon could read the voltage and see if something is off.
That house was >10% fluctuation, hence this post
saying that a more clear picture from a scope would very likely look quite shitty.
10% fluctuation in either direction of nominal. So for the USA that would be between 108 and 132 volts, considering 120 is nominal. So your measurements were within tolerance. And perfectly normal to see voltage drops as load increase by time of day. The net is literally calculated for this, more power plants go online by afternoon to supply peak demand between 5 and 8 pm. As plants go off and online, peaks amd drops in voltge are more noticeable. Add to that stuff like solar panels causing peaks as weather changes.
If you worked with electricity with any regularity you would know this.
Power company guys say it’s fricked. New house doesn’t fluctuate anything like that place. I’m not saying the power company is trying to scam me with dirty power, I’m saying the power at that house was fricked and would very likely look shitty on the scope based on living there for years and having the lights flicker and AC compressor stall and shit.
I don’t want to argue with the internet electrical engineering degree of armchair university. I don’t have a degree, just real life experiences between homes.
10% is within international standards for power fluctuation. EU has that norm too, between 207 and 253 volts (nominal 230) is considered perfectly acceptable.
Man I miss classic electricity, they say the new stuff is better but it just doesn't have the same feel
>doesn't have the same feel
Right? He energy is just off. Like night and day.
One thing I've noticed is that if you have a spikes and noise on your mains, then those plug-in alarm clocks tend to run fast.
I think this is because they time themselves with the zero-crossing of the 60 Hz line frequency, and the spikes add more of these.
I had a florescent light bulb cause this, I noticed it because when I replaced the bulb I didn't have to run my clock back to the right time every week.
I fricking hate flourescent lights so much.
Not one of those people who get nauseous from them or anything, but I got a 10pk or something of these god awful CFL bulbs like 10 years back that were supposed to be “Daylight” but were some god awful horrible cool blue tint and a spectrum that made me want to sudoku myself in that living room.
Don’t get me started on old school strip flourescent fixtures… they don’t like to start cold, they don’t like to start when it’s too humid, use tons of juice on startup, flickering, ballast goes out.
The only thing flourescent lights are good for is when they do a renovation and you find a hundred used 48” tubes in a dumpster, grab those c**ts and take them to the top floor of a parking garage along with a 27” tube TV.
I had a similar problem.
Turned out to be the set-screw on one breaker wasn't tight enough.
Tightened the screw to bite the wire better and it stopped.