Thread: We Had A Brown Out

For anyone younger than me you might not have heard of a brown out.
It has probably been 45 plus years since I have heard of them.

So for those that don't know it is a massive drop in voltage to the house and if you had old incandescent globes, they would be dim.

So here's what happened. Power went off for about 8 seconds and came back on. About two minutes later the same happened again.
I thought nothing more about it until half an hour later went to rinse a dinner plate, I had no water.

We are on tank water so we rely on a pump. My first thoughts was the blackout had tripped a circuit breaker in the switch board.
All was good there, so my thoughts turn to the blackout frying my water pump.

Lucky for me I did not have a screw driver in the house to check something on the pump, so I went to the shed to get one.
The fluro light in the shed did not work. I tried the outside light which is an old style flood light and it was dim..

Mmmm. Straight to the multi meter to find that we only have 140 volts coming to the house
Our house has all LED and compact florescent globes which did not seem affected by this low voltage, so there was no tell tale.
Even the plasma tv was working fine.

So as soon as I found out I unplugged all appliances that had electric motors, fridge air con etc.
So had I not had to go to the shed, I could have spent hours checking and swapping the water pump (I have a spare but it involves a fair bit of plumbing as it is different size)
and had the fridge and aircon damaged.

Seen plenty of them over the years.

One about twenty years ago burnt out every contactor coil on a star-delta start for a customers coolroom.
This was only about 70km from Sydney.

We used to cop them a lot in country nsw too, we were on a radial feed from up near Gunnedah 100km away or so as the crow flies, so anything that happened between affected a lot of communities, and it didn't take much as most of the sub stations were old and undersized.
The one on Murrurundi was only upgraded about 5 years ago, about 30 years past when it should've been done.