Heads up - Power flickering
 

Just a heads up for everyone in the west end, I noticed the power is flickering in certain spots over here due to the electric storm. I was fortunate enough to be sitting at home when the halides and SEIO's died so I could flick them back on. If you can, check on yours, halides will definetly be off if it flickers, and im not sure if being turned 'on' when they are still too hot to run is bad for them.

Take care, hope tanks are well:mrgreen:

Chris

I also heard that the power companies will be shutting off the power for 20-30 min intervals in pretty much every neighborhood this month to save power. Aparently, AB doesn't generate enough electricity of it's own to run home AC units!

I believe we are just sending way too much of it to the US if thats the case...

The water also lost pressure for a few hours yesterday... that might just have been someone diging in their yard though(Hope it wasnt any canreefers installing geothermal chillers cause of the heat wave...:lol:)!

Yeah the city is has been forced into planned 1/2 hour brown outs.

Yesterday they decided rush hour would be a great time to do it! !@#$%!@#

This kind of stuff is why I am apprehensive to go to GFI outlets, especially when I travel, because if it trips and nobody switches it back on for a day or two, that can be costly!

When I re-do my electrical I think I will run both GFI & regular outlets so I can choose.

Gee, thats a good call Rory!

Umm... yeah we cant be doing that in a province that supplies power to EVERYONE ELSE but itself? Thats ridiculous, number one first, no?

Lets just shut down parliment for half the day every day and see how the country runs....

I was wondering yesterday why lights were out all over the west end? I saw this a couple weeks ago too, during rush hour.

Lighting.... power companies... whats next... solar storm?

ummmmm.... Better? lol

:mrgreen:

Haha... possibly... im not sure if your suggesting crappy government party, or just, crappy government in general? Haha. I might agree with the latter option, but im slighty right of center myself, so conservative floats my boat a little more than liberal. Although, I wish there was more of an environmental concern with conservatives.

Chris

Edit... yeah I guess either way, likely better, haha.

Our power went off around 5 p.m. Gads!!!! I thought it was going to be a replay of what happened a few summers ago, when the power went off for 4 hours one hot summer night. Had a 75g reef, a 180g oscar tank and a 110g indoor goldfish pond. We were up half the night going from tank to tank stirring the water to help oxygenate it. Luckily, this time, power was out less than a half hour.

Read in the paper this morning about the rotating black outs due to a number of factors, including two local power stations being down for maintenance and another station down for unknown reasons. Of course, there are other reasons, like the ones mentioned above, but our own power generators were off line yesterday. Who schedules maintenance during a heat wave???

Also read in the paper that California is also experiencing rotating black outs due to the high power consumption during their extremely hot heat wave. It's been 40+ C in some places down there.

IIRC, Alberta is on the same power grid as California, so there is export of power back and forth along the grid. It's the same in the East, when there was that huge power black out in ON, PQ and down into the US a couple of years back. Hahaha, those dumb Americans blamed Canada for the power disruption when it first happened, but after investigation, the problem was found to be on the American side of the border. I'm thinking Americans watch too much South Park :P

Glad I'm not in NYC where there are thousands of people who have been without for over a week. They still don't know where the problem is and don't know when power will be restored. Hate to be a reefer in that location. Heck, hate to be a anyone, reefer or not, and not have power for that long. Four hours is bad enough in this weather!

Too true!

I dont mind the heat myself, but I know it makes everyone else, and all the critters, quite uncomfortable.

power outs
 

right now the plant at wabamum is down(no power till aug 17th boiler when down)
the highvale plant i work at has 2 units down so not so much power but still going and some main line to b.c is down too

Did you knock it off line with your trawler Ed..?? :razz:

GFI should behave the same in a outage as regular receptacle. Unless there's been a ground fault, why would they trip?

Should be, but there have been lots of reports of "picky" GFI outlets that trip in situations like this, especially "flickering" power as the title of this thread indicates.

Why would they all go down in such synchrony? I mean, I understand power demand is/was a little higher, but I wouldnt see that affecting the actual generation stations, just the power grid for moving electricity.

Chris

Hmmm California, Ohio (the source of the east coast blackout) and Alberta all having strange power problems and rolling blackouts. Couldn't be related to deregulation could it.....

Remember folks, it's not only about higher prices, there are other benefits to deregulation!

We had our power flicker sometime last week. All of our outlets are GFIs. In both the flickering and the black out, power to our tanks went back on with no problem.

Anyone see ENRON "The Smartest Guys in the Room" documentary? In California it was the Enron traders making calls to the power stations to convince them to go off line or reduce there capacity because they would say the demand was lower (which it wasnt) resulting in the cost of power to increase therefore increasing Enrons profits while creating widespread power outages.

Yes, but if there have been reports of picky outlets, then either it CAN happen, although very rarely, or a few people might occasionally incorectly wire them... either way, I'd rather have a guarentee that the power will come back, rather than sit and worry from a distance away whether my outlets tripped or not.

Isnt it possible to run the actual current through regular outlets and run all the grounds somewhere else? Could you have some sort of 'master GFI' that... would only cut power if it detected flow through the ground wire, in which case a power flicker should not affect it? Or am I just out to lunch?:razz:

Anyways...

Well, probably a really stupid question since I was slightly paying attention to the Enron ordeal... but, what did Enron do? What kind of corp/comp were they?

Thanks:wink:

Chris

That is what I was essentially what I was getting at. Enron certainly wasn't the only company involved in shenanigans with the Calfornia market at the time either.

The government announced they are going to investigate the current situation today. There's no evidence that anyone has been messing around trying to run up prices but I certainly wonder how all these companies end up doing maintenance at the same time. I understand that not all of it is planned outages, stuff happens but I'm wondering why these companies can't talk to each other and maybe plan maintenance windows better.

Yeah, thats what I didnt/dont get... I mean as I said above, its not the heat wave causing the problems with the power companies... all the draw from the city only messes with the dristribution grid... but when different plants etc.. are having problems that doesnt make sense...

Im still a little lost with some of the international complications you are all talking about though:lol:

Sheerness Generating Station which supplys about 800 M/W of power got disconected from the grid due to line problems from Anderson to Sheerness. When these power lines went down they had to shut down.

And to answer the question why they plan major matainance during the spring, summer and fall and not in the winter is that they don't have to keep everything from freezing up. Plants like Sundance, Wabamun, and Keephills generaly have 1 unit down for maintance and they have a roving crew that move from plant to plant. Others like Sheerness have an outage about once a year (planed) If it is an unplaned outage like a boiler leak they have to depresurize and vent the boiler, repair the leak then refire the boiler, then warm the uint up and then bring it back online. You can't just flick a switch and you are making 400 meg/watts you have to bring it up slow.
If you want to check out who is making power here is a link

http://ets.powerpool.ab.ca/

Cool! Makes sense, thanks!