Thread: Electricity supply question - 3 phase vs 1 phase

Stu, the reason they come on at 11 and other odd hours is that the old mechanical time clocks used to drift around or stop for a while. Back when I were a lad too, when we did work in a meter box we would often reset the clocks to go on and off at a more correct time. My first house never had a time clock at all, it was never installed, so I had off peak hot water 24 hrs a days. I don't recall ever reporting that, I think it slipped my mind. Probably still like it )
When I was talking about a switchwire I meant the same as used to power the street lights before PE cells came along. If the line coming in to Avery's house supplied the full power for the off peak (and turned on and off) there would have to be an extra wire running down the street from the main time clock, or whatever. Making 5 wires on the LV street mains (or 6 if the street lights were switched the same way). But then all the local houses would be on the same phase for off peak and the transformer load would be really unbalanced at night. Like I said, it could be done, but was never done that way in SA.

And yes I can believe about Japan. Spent a day or so each passing through Tokyo and Okinawa. But better than many other countries.

Regards
SWK

Originally Posted by Schtoo

. . . .(Don't ask what they get away with here. Scary...)

I worked at several research labs in Japan for about 4 months back in the mid 90's. What I was surprised about was that not much stuff was earthed. Even some metal bodied equipment often just had a two pin plug. The other thing was endless adapater boards plugged into more adapter boards. In one very squeezy postgraduate student work room which housed about 15 students, I was allocated about 500 mm of desk space for a few weeks, and I pretty sure every student's computer ran off just one GPO.

I will take the best of the advice andcall in a pro.

The house is pre '70s. but there have been many changes.

There are defintely 3 insulated wires coming from the pole across the street. There appears to be only 1 50 amp main fuse. There is an off peak meter and another single phase meter - both are "smart" meters. Most of the circuit breakers hav ebeen moved to a sub-board inside the house.The main switch in the meter box kills all power to the house (as it should) there is another breaker in the box that also kills all power and there are separate breakers on the sub board that kill the power and lighting circuits.

Beyond that I have absolutely no idea, so it is time to spend some money.