----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin MOMGM" <[email protected]>
Recently the economy 7 electric meter was changed from a black box to a
grey box with green and red buttons. The former had a single button
that could be used to select normal and off peak consumption as well as
displaying time. The time was picked up from what I thought was a sub
carrier of Radio 4 long wave or maybe MSF. It was very accurate,
matching time on my GPS. The new unit also displays time but is exactly
10 minutes behind GMT. Any ideas?
One thought is that the units are set with specific time differentials
so as not to overload the national grid with a single big switch on.
That might be it. Some time ago a local electricity company sold quite a lot
of economy seven electric storage heaters to people in this village. After a
little while we started getting frequent outages in the small hours of the
morning. This was of course in the middle of winter. It seems the bulk of
the people who bought the heaters were all on the same phase of our
three-phase overhead distribution. So, at 2 o'clock in the morning, that
phase was suddenly overloaded and the overcurrent protection operated.
I understand that control rooms for both electricity and water companies
have precise details of when commercial television advertisements are
scheduled to be transmitted, as well the actual times when episodes of
popular programmes finish.
73
John G3PAI
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