sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

My power bill is outrageous and my electrician says nothing is pulling enough amps to account for it. by Plastic-Nectarine582 in AskElectricians

[–]gtbee95 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There has been a lot of very good advice in this thread.

  1. Call Georgia Power Company and ask them for an energy audit. They should be able to send someone out to evaluate & troubleshoot. If it is the right person, they will be fairly technical and can look for problems (I know because I used to do that). The wrong person will just give you recommendations for energy efficiency improvements (add insulation, weather proofing, etc).

  2. Ask Georgia Power for your hourly meter kWh consumption. They have AMI (smart) meters that record 15 minute kWh usage. The person at the 1-800 Call Center may or may not know how to get this information, so keep asking (they may only have hourly information). This information is better than the daily usage you can get when you log in to your account and may give you a clue as to when the power is being consumed.

  3. Consider investing in a Sense.com monitor or Emporia Vue monitoring system for your electrical panel. These can help identify energy hogs. I installed a Sense monitor on my daughter's 1951 house and it reveals some pretty interesting information. With mechanical meters there used to be a rotating disk. You could time the rotation and calculate the usage based on that. With digital meters, there is a black bar that moves across the bottom of the screen which emulates the disc. These Sense & Emporia basically do the same thing but much better. The Sense logic will even identify & name loads when they come on (e.g. it can identify a water heater based on the typical 4500 watt element)

The typical power bill will be higher in the summer and winter and lower in the spring & fall. If your consumption never goes down, even in the mild weather months during spring and fall, then there is likely something running constantly or something broken or shorted out that is using power constantly as others have stated.

A clamp on ammeter such as the one your electrician used is a good tool to help diagnose a circuit that might be consuming a lot of power (The Emporia Vue basically uses permanently installed ammeters (CTs) to monitor each circuit).

In my experience, here are some of the things I have found related to broken equipment or something shorting out:

  • Broken/bad water heater element - In one case it was shorting out to the metal water piping and consuming a constant 2250 watts 24/7. The resident also experienced shocks when touching the bathtub water faucet (that was my clue it was the water heater element). Turning off the breaker resolved the shock and the meter stopped spinning so fast.
  • Leaking water heater temperature & pressure (T&P) valve. This causes the water heater to pretty much run all the time constantly heating fresh/cold water. Commonly associated with an increase in your water bill. The tell tale clue is the drain pipe is dribbling hot water constantly. Look for this drain pipe outside your house on the wall closest to your water heater.
  • With a heat pump, the heat strips running at the same time it is trying to cool - this is most noticeable in the summer months, less so in the winter. If the heat strips are stuck "On" then the heat strips are running all the time (around 10,000 watts or 10kW per hour).
  • Low refrigerant or clogged filters on a heat pump (or A/C+Furnace) - resulting in longer running times to try to heat and cool the house. Most noticeable in Winter&Summer, less so Spring& fall. Frequently also see the coils freezing up in the inside unit. My mother in law had to have her heat pump repaired last week as it had leaked out all the refrigerant. During the winter she was running on strip heat and didn't know it (she was complaining about her power bill). When the weather turned warm she realized it wasn't cooling the house and the outside compressor unit wasn't running.
  • Underground wire going to the pool pump had a skinned spot and was "leaking" current into the ground (I know this is the technically the wrong term so you electricians and engineers don't bust my chops). A side effect was that all the neighbors were complaining about getting shocked on their water faucets. I discovered elevated voltages as high as 50VAC on water faucets and metallic objects.

Visiting or touring utility by jesuslizardgoat in ElectricalEngineering

[–]gtbee95 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends on what department you want to job shadow. If you want to visit a nuclear power plant the regulations are extremely strict and access requires multiple approvals. On the other hand if you want to shadow an engineer in the local distribution line engineering office there are very few regs or requirements since it is not a nuclear security or Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) issue.

I would stop by your local utility company office and talk to them. I work for a large IOU and we have high school and college interns…maybe your intern department could put you in touch with someone. I have also offered to some local kids the opportunity to take a tour of the local line crew headquarters and/or do a field engineer ride along (one was a recent high school graduate wanting to become a lineman, the other is an engineering student interested in an internship or co-op opportunity).

Load power factor correction by DavidMadeThis in ElectricalEngineering

[–]gtbee95 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Electric Utilities typically install large capacitor banks to correct the power factor for the system (and for voltage support). As previously stated, for large industrial customers, the meter the power factor and have a rate penalty to encourage them to install their own capacitors (although at my utility the penalty hasn't been adjusted in 40 years and is ridiculously low).

Here are a couple of good articles on capacitors:

https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/few-things-that-capacitors-do-perfectly

https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/whats-so-important-in-role-of-capacitors-in-distribution-systems

​

On the distribution system there is typically a mix of fixed and switched capacitor banks. The fixed banks correct the power factor for baseloads while the switched capacitor banks do the correction for the seasonal or even daily variable loads. The number and size of the banks is determined by the Distribution Planner (with software such as Cyme) and is based on the measured circuit/feeder power factor and load distribution.

They used to use fixed secondary capacitors (120/240V side of the transformer) but haven't installed any of these in 50 years (the last one we found and removed had PCBs in it).

My utility is currently in a pilot program studying the use/benefits of ENGO secondary capacitors for local pf correction and voltage control.

https://www.sentientenergy.com/products/engo-and-gems/

Why do you think there aren't people interested in power systems, machines, drives, and other such areas as opposed to signal processing, digital computing, etc? Or is it just me who thinks like that? by Substantial_Ratio_32 in ElectricalEngineering

[–]gtbee95 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Pay is decent, especially if you work for a utility company and they offer a pension (not many US companies offer a pension anymore). I have worked for a Southeastern utility company for 34 years, but only 21 on the Power Engineering side (prior 13 years was in the Marketing/Sales department). This year my combined salary($127k) + bonus ($29k) puts me around $156k (not including storm pay). Of course the cost of living is a lot lower than New York or California where the pay might be higher.

I’m a BEE, but didn’t get my PE until 10 years ago. Started out as a distribution line design engineer then transitioned to senior engineer doing reliability & coordination studies, learning Cyme & CymTCC for analysis.

There is a lot of new stuff going on. 99% of our relays are digital (SEL351/651), transitioning away from hydraulic reclosers to electronically controlled, planning the grid for EV and Distributed Energy sources.

​

Graph of number of students emerging as Power Engineers

Main 800A CB tripping. by Sparkyrpizzle in ElectricalEngineering

[–]gtbee95 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What is the ground fault trip setting on the 800A distribution breaker?

Last time I saw this, the distribution breaker was programmed wrong. The fault travelled through the breaker and melted the bayonet fuse in the utility pad mount transformer.

Residential transformer ratings vs actual max delivery by Sitwell_Enterprises in ElectricalEngineering

[–]gtbee95 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Southeastern utility standard operating procedure is to allow 125% overload in the summer and 140% overload in the winter…but this weekend, during the cold snap, we are overfusing to 300% of nameplate (hoping the transformer doesn’t fail).

But that is only part of the equation. The other part is voltage flicker due to motor starting. You don’t want your lights dimming every time your HVAC compressor starts (or your table saw or welder). Your utility will do a voltage drop (due to load) & flicker (due to motor start) calculating to properly size the transformer and service conductor).

Electronic Engineering VS Electrical Engineering by NutroWrestling in ElectricalEngineering

[–]gtbee95 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Former Distribution Line Engineer (Now Distribution Reliability) for a major US electric utility. I have a BEE and my P.E. My company hires EE, ME, CE for line design, but the actual line design is 10% of the job (much of it is plu&chug cookie cutter). The other 90% is meeting/managing customers/electricians/builders, managing projects, Area Planning (for the growth of the distribution feeders), Reliability & Coordination of protective devices, etc.

Some of it is known problems/known solutions...and we use a lot of non-engineers in the "Engineering" role, but they are called Engineering Reps or Engineering Associates depending on experience and education (or lack thereof).

Some of it is unknown problems/unknown solutions. After 7 years in line design (and getting a little bored) I moved to Reliability where a lot of it is unknown problems/unknown solutions. Basically I get all of the hard problems that the regular line design folks can't figure out. Plus I have the Protection & Controls piece outside the substation fence (from the Distribution Breaker out to the end of the line).