A client has an art gallery in an old building in Laguna Beach. She called me because the lights in half of the gallery were out, but none of the circuit breakers in the sub panel had tripped. At the meter there was an ancient main power box with a two pole knife switch and one 30A fuse for each leg of the 240V feed.
One fuse had blown, so only one bus in the sub panel had power, hence the problem of half the lights not working. The interesting thing was that the meter wheel was not turning until I replaced the blown fuse. PO CO guy showed up while I was there and explained that the meter requires 240 to turn, even though power was flowing on one leg.
Moral of the story…put everything on one buss and disconnect the other and you’ll never pay for power again. 🙂
Replies
I am going to get a 120/240 transformer to run my heat pumps and give that a try.
William the Geezer, the sequel to Billy the Kid - Shoe
Ah if it were true ...
The PoCo guy is wrong.
OK, why was the meter not turning?
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could be a broken meter... the one on RFH Ranch didn't work for 6 months.... utility finally replaced itMike Hussein Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
"could be a broken meter."But the meter ran again when the fuse on one leg was replaced. Do you mean to say that it somehow has been seeing only one of the two legs all this time? Has my client been paying for only half her usage?That does help me to focus the question that went unasked in the original post. How can an open circuit on one leg DOWNSTREAM from the meter affect the meter wheel?
BruceT
sometimes it would run... then not...if you tapped it...it might start or not
they replaced the meter and her discount is gone.... but for a while we had one very efficient energy conserving homeMike Hussein Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
Maybe it was half broken.Maybe it is suction activated and only works when there is full suction and not half sucked
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well then, maybe I'm half broken too
Had a neighbors tree take out my service drop during six days of storms. Had the primary hot lying on my drop from the transformer just glowin a nice white ball. Pulled my meter globe just to be safe.
Six days later at 10pm PGE comes to put it all back together. The guy who popped my meter back in had been at it for 25 hrs straight. Thanked him for all the long days and off they went.
Next bill is ZERO. Huh? Maybe I'll see about that meter?
Upside down. The guy was tired, it was dark, and I'm sure the meter was fogged up pretty good.
So, call PGE a few days later, no rush, They thank me for the call and they will send a troubleman out.
TWO months later I get a call about some problem with my meter reading and they want to test the meter. All the while the meter reader has see it, three time no less.
Pop a new one in, test this and that and boom your ready to go. No charge.
Three months free electric and 100 bucks for being whithout power for six days. I did have power running from nextdoor so it was not camping.
Got to love my energy efficent house. I go to compare bills and everything is kinda of strange.
matt
Great story!BruceT
Put the meter in upside down a few days a month and power bills go down significantly. Had a friend who did that on a regular basis. Never got caught.
After his power was turned off for non-payment, he turned the electric on at the transformer so many times they took it.
How did he replace the broken seal each month?
We get jokers like that pretty regularly.
A thief is a thief is a thief.
His theft of service is going into your rate base.
Still think he was slick?
If we catchem, we prosecute them.
No he just left it. Its nothing I would do and I've known this for years before I met him.
Nothing personal intended.
I just happento work for a poco.
It is a touchy issue for me.
Had friend shot by a HO while he was disconnecting the sevice at the pole, because the HO was constantly stealing service. My friend recovered, but is no longer a lineman. He can't climb because of the damage done to his hip by the bullet. I never heard what the HO got in the way of a sentence, but IMO it couldn't have been enough for ruining a mans career.
Gawdf, I hope that guy's service was permanently disabled
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Well that leg might be shorted in the meter. Or that leg might connected to someone else meter. If I remember correctly this is in a building with other users..
William the Geezer, the sequel to Billy the Kid - Shoe
My parents bought a house in Bellevue, WA in 1987 that was originally built for the developer of the neighborhood. A few years after the purchase, they decided to remove a hot tub and build a larger deck. The contractor that I was working for at the time was hired for the job. When he was getting ready to disconnect the wiring for the hot tub, he went to the main panel and turned off the main breaker for the house, went back around the house, got his linesman pliers out, and proceeded to cut the 240V cable to the pump. He got the shock of his life, no pun intended, when he bit into that cable. The cable was still live! Apparently, the builder had somehow circumvented the meter and run a 240V line directly to the pump. I have no idea how he managed this, but I'm sure it save him, and later my parents, a few bucks on the electrical bill.
That experience is why I always check for potential even after tripping a breaker. All of my recent homes have been previously owned, and there's no telling what might have been done by the earlier owners. In one, the detached garage door opener wouldn't work unless the kitchen light was on. It also had a wall switch that was a mystery, sort of like that commercial where the guy flips the switch, and it makes a neighbor's garage door go up and down. I like those stick sensors that can detect both potential and current flow.
Two meters per meter box, two conduits coming out of the bottoms of the boxes, each connected to a fuse box with double pole knife switch shut-off and two Edison-base fuses. Even when the meter wheel was not turning, there was 240V from leg to leg of hot side of the switch in the fuse box and 120V from either leg to neutral. Feed terminal of the working fuse tested 120V to neutral, feed leg of dead fuse, of course, tested 0V. When the dead fuse was replaced there was 240V across the feed terminals and the meter wheel was spinning.BruceT
piffin, the reason the meter wasn't working is beacause it is a 240v meter, in other words the return path is 1 of the 120 volt legs. The lights in the house worked because the return path is the neutral, which does not flow through the meter, but goes directly to the center tap of the utility transformer.
That rings true
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Both poles go through the meter (if properly wired). Pulling 2A on one side and zero on the other will register the same as pulling 1A at 240V.
As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place. --Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz
There's one problem with your answer to Piffin. There was 240V potential between the two hot wires entering the fuse box, so there had to have been 240 across the poles inside the meter. When the fuse on one leg was no good only the feed wire downstream from the blown fuse was dead, not the upstream wires.BruceT
I can imagine that it may be flux between the two legs that causes the meter to work, but I'm no expert.Nonetheless, after a few months of zero KWH of use, from a house that is clearly occupied, I think the poco would become suspicious. Scott.
funny story... my brother was living in a multi family, landlord upstairs from him. he was changing a light fixture in his kitchen so he shut off the breaker. landlord came screaming downstairs to find out why HIS power was out
WTF? Bro called utility company. landlord had to reimburse every nickel my brother paid for power over the 3 years he lived there
then he had to move out
"landlord came screaming downstairs to find out why HIS power was out"I guess your brother is lucky the landlord didn't go straight to the breaker panel to restore power.Your brother had to move out? Was that so the landlord could get a new tenant in to pay for his power consumption? :)BruceT
I'm guessing that it wasn't a 240V meter, but a 120V unit, just wired to one leg. Probably left over from when the service was 120V.
Your client may have been getting a "deal", only paying for half the electricity, or the POCO may have been just doubling the reading.
Interesting suggestion. I didn't know there were such things as 120V meters. The service was clearly 240 from the get-go 70 years or so ago. There were about a dozen meters on the wall for the various tenants of the building, same style but several different manufacturers and I remember the descriptions on some of them being 240V, but not sure if hers was labeled such.Some of the meters were labeled 240V 3W. Is that describing the power consumption of the meter wheel?BruceT