I unearthed a conspiracy theory :)

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i know what you're thinking : "oh here we go, another crackpot 911 etc" - but this one actually holds water

its about the utility companies


all residential and commercial buildings in the UK are fitted with an electricity meter, no surprise there.
MOST of these meters (whether mechanical or digital) work on current alone (the more current a consumer draws, the faster they clock up the units)

now, what the utility companies do, is LOWER the input supply voltage to the house, and because of the Power, Voltage ad Current relationship (P=IV, I=P/V etc). because the load in the building remains the same, lowering the supply voltage jacks up the current draw - thus making the meter spin faster.

example:
i use a 3 bar fire, 3kW, on a 250V supply - this is 12 amps
i use the same 3 bar fire, 3kW, on a 230V supply - this is 13.04 amps.
and thats an extra amp per hour being clocked on the meter.
im using the same load, but more amps because of less voltage.

electricity units are maybe 16p per unit, go do the math...


some conspiracy theory, eh?

genius, when you think about it.
you could counteract it with a line-interactive monitoring transformer - but that would involve tampering with a device installed by the utility company - which of course is illegal - which makes it even more genius.

evil, but genius....

Do you have any proof of this?

In contrast to most "crackpot conspiracy theories", this one should be easy to confirm or deny, since it involves an easily measurable quantity.

Voltage drop is due to the increased load on the lines. When few people tap into the grid, the line voltage for all of them will be at or near its maximum. As more and more people connect their appliances, the line load increases. This is a result of Ohm's Law, which states that with a constant source voltage, the line current increases with a decrease in load impedance.

E = I x R

Now, even the power lines have impedance, which is constant. We'll use a value of 100 Ohms (R = 100).

Let's say that the source voltage is 220 Volts (E = 200).

Let us now say that one house is connected to the line. It's impedance is 900 Ohms. This makes for a total load impedance of 1000 ohms (100 + 900 = 1000).

Total line current is thus 0.22 Amperes (I = 220 / 1000 = 0.22).

Multiply the total line current by the house impedance, and you get 198 Volts (0.22 x 900 = 198). Where is the rest of the voltage?

Multiply the total line current by the line impedance, and you get 22 Volts (0.22 x 100 = 22).

Add the two voltages together, and you get 220 Volts (198 + 22 = 220). The missing line voltage is on the power lines themselves!

As you add more and more houses in parallel, the total house impedance will decrease, as will the voltage measured at the houses.

Thus, according to Ohm's Law, the most likely cause of a drop in voltage measured at the house is that more and more houses are placed on the line.

So don't blame the utilities, blame your neighbors, especially if you live far from the utilities generators.

-Fnord, MSEE-

This was an issue in the 60s, but the utility companies had a "lightbulb moment" - pun intended - and thought "heyyyy... wait..."
in the sixties, the lights would visibly get dimmer and dimmer as time went on thru the night.


so yes, consumption and transmission loss does play a part, but you can't honestly say the utility companies wouldnt do this to cream off more money?

Nice try - but they're not doing it here.
Some plots of the domestic power supply voltage as it appears on the input to my UPS, derived from my server log files.

Line voltage, weekly (30 minute averages of 1 reading every 5 minutes):
[img][800:387]http://i1192.photobucket.com/albums/aa324/Cornflake444/WP/LineVoltageWeekly.png[/img]

Line voltage, yearly (daily averages of 1 reading every 5 minutes):
[img][800:387]http://i1192.photobucket.com/albums/aa324/Cornflake444/WP/LineVoltageYearly.png[/img]

all i know is, they did it at my college - my lecturers were complaining because several sensitive bits of gear didn't like 215-220 instead of 230-240...

I suspect that was just a local substation issue.
In the yearly graph above there was a period in early October when the line voltage stayed quite low for a while, and on similar logs I kept on an earlier incarnation of the server there was a period of almost two months where it was pretty constant at ~220v - then popped back up to the usual ~240v.
Other times there have been short-term and weird oscillations between different voltages: fairly constant along the up/down voltage levels, but 'switching' between them roughly every two days.

i will be going to the office on friday, i will see if i can find a similar graph to cornflakes from the 2 UPS's set up there.
another data point.

as for line voltage,
in any country with large amounts of smaller units (ie alternative energy) they can be used to regulate the line voltage in very small increments, actually many wind turbines are set up with this as their primary intended function, with power being an added bonus.

in reality i dont think it is any more than standard fluctuations in supply.

They already scam us enough I think. Fuel prices have gone down but my electricity bill hasn't. Not to mention the countless they overcharge for prepayment.

So you think you're on to something and that you have it all figured out.

Now, what are you going to actually do about it?

I mean, something more than just posting misleading data on a social website; one that is dedicated to people with perceptive disorders.