Electricity Monitoring, Before The Meter

[James Sentman]

I am enjoying this conversation, but I have some concerns.

Assuming a whole house transfer switch and not a load side switch (like I cheaped out and got for myself) is that it switches the input side, so 100 amps or more of potential. You can’t just connect that to a 15 amp outlet and expect anyone to pass that when you sell your house or when the electric company comes out to put in a new meter or something. Instead they will lock it out until you have someone come out and inspect your fixes leaving you in the dark even longer.

There has to be a way to connect a sensing device to the input however. I’ve seen this in installs of many more amps than that industrially. Tiny little wires attached to buss bars that are used to sense the input voltage and if paired with ones after a shunt the current. So there IS somewhere in the code the ability to do this safely. Just sticking a couple of tiny wires down into the same screw terminals that your 100 amp input is connected to is not the way to do it.

Every single automatic transfer switch I’ve ever seen will properly switch back to line power after it has been available and stable for some short amount of time. You shouldn’t have to go and manually do so. If it doesn’t then there has got to be a way to attach an indicator lamp or something to show the availability of line power. In which case you can use that output to also run a relay or a current sense relay or something similar. If there really is no way to get access to that without hacking something then you need an external box with an appropriate circuit breaker before you sense the voltage and not just connecting a 15 amp outlet to a 100 amp feed without an interrupt in between there somewhere. Those are not expensive, but convincing an electrician to come and put it in might be. 

Once you have the properly safed outputs going to a 120v relay you can connect the contacts of that to any dry contact sensor. ZWave X10, wireless X10, honestly anything at all that we can connect to or roll your own with an arduino or something. That part is fairly simple.

Please please don’t just wedge a little wire into the 100 amp output from the meter though. There has GOT to be an appropriate way to connect a sensor to that which is approved and won’t make the next electrician that comes by your house lock you out and pull the meter until you fix the thing. That and you really don’t want to burn your own house down. Ignoring the possibility of causing death to family members or yourself, Insurance companies absolutely love to find out you did something like that after a fire and refuse to pay. One of the things I LOVE about this house is that I have a breaker out by the meter that lets me cut power completely to the panels to make them truly safe to work in. I do not work on the other side of that switch. I will call an electrician and pay them to do that properly for me, I highly recommend that unless you are an actual licensed electrician, or used to be one, that you do the same.

That all being said, help me understand these outages in CA right now… Do I understand the logic properly in that the wind is blowing so hard that the wires on PG&E’s poles are oscillating so much that they eventually smack into each other causing arcs which then somehow start wildfires on the ground? My sympathy for their having installed such poles in a way that is not compatible with the local environment is completely lacking. I hope you all sue them until they realize they are spending more money than it would take them to upgrade those feed lines to a larger separation or a lesser poll separation, or even underground in places. The whole thing sounds to me like oh, we installed the cheapest thing possible, and it doesn’t work anymore, so instead of fixing it we’re going to just turn off your power for a couple of weeks at a time. 

I also have to wonder at the environmental impact of such a thing since CA makes such an effort to look like they care about such things. Outlawing plastic straws and such… Even if 1 in a hundred customers affected run a 4 stroke generator to keep their fridges from thawing out during the outage they have just undone the work of every penny they spent tax wise or fee wise on wind turbines and solar for the entire decade. Stupidity is hard to measure but I’m fairly certain this is an example that I’d have to be several orders of magnitude off on my math to not recognize.



> On Oct 12, 2019, at 2:22 PM, Mike Andrews <mikea0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yeah. Since the utilility power feed has to be isolated from the generator you should be able to simply install an outlet before the transfer switch and plug a relay and indicator light in.
> 
> Use the relay to trigger a remote indicator or wire the dry contacts into an HA transmitter for Xtension to see.  The X10 Power (thing) for example will do the trick.
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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