I saw a video where someone cracks open a smart meter and tries to reverse engineer it. Interestingly, it looks like it had anti-tampering hardware that could - at least in theory - sense that the power had been disconnected (or cut…) and send a ‘distress’ call to the supplier.
Here is a link to Big Clive’s video:
If you read the smart meter data sheets, they, or at least some, log breaks in supply, so correlating that with known supply interruptions would show whether the main fuse had been pulled out. I doubt they would want the meter to do that automatically as the supply failed, but it’s feasible to imagine that meters might be programmed to report the event back at random intervals over the next day or two (so that given a widespread power network fault, the comms network didn’t get overloaded by a few thousand or tens of thousands trying to do it all at the same time).
Big Clive needs to think in terms of the temperature coefficient of resistance of copper to explain the metal that forms the real current shunt (and the shunt isn’t the copper, those are just current-carrying combined terminals/bars).
Yes, that is an interesting thing in the anglo-saxon world, I’m not aware of such a title or registration in Belgium.
I could also set up rules with my experience and knowledge, but I’m not allowed to. For this you have to be employed by a certification authority, be part of something like IEEE, or hired by a political party as a subject matter expert. The rules are then cast in laws voted by people who usually have no idea about the matter whatsoever, the king waves his staff over it and then it is legal rule.
Good question. You know that, I do, but the reviewers must follow the law.
The law says RCD Type A, does not say B is forbidden or allowed. So they are uneasy. And rightly so. Because lawyer-sharks working for insurance companies will bring that up in court if your house caught fire: they will say the installation was not according to legal regulations so they do not need to pay anything to the owner of the house. Science does not matter. Data does not matter. Only the law matters. And lawyers are not truth seekers, they are sharks working for money and the best ones are the ones who can find holes in the law.
The holes in the law are deliberate, they are put in so the rich and powerful can get away with being crooks while the populous’ behavior is kept predictable. Insurance companies fall in the category of making sure they can collect premiums and promise something they will never do, because the law says so. Panama papers etc… is supporting evidence: a deliberate hole in the law that allows the rich and powerful to evade taxes. Those people laughed in the face of viewers on TV shows saying they did not do anything illegal. The politicians said there was no need to change the law. The people are mad for a while, than the attention turns to the next issue and everybody forgets about it, so nothing changes. This mindset leads to ridiculous situations from a science viewpoint, but are very consistent in what the law tries to achieve: make the plebs’ behavior predictable and vulnerable to the rich and powerful. The fact that professional maffia can also use that and evades punishment is accepted collateral damage.
RCD-B is prescribed for EV charge points. The law prescribes an EVSE must be on its own circuit with an RCD-B and a “fuse”. An EVSE on an existing circuit is allowed as long as the EVSE has type B protection either built in or added to the circuit. The bathroom rules were not revisited as a result of this new rule for charge points. I agree this may be a legislator’s oversight and not intentional. We have to wait until someone in a bathroom protected with and RCD-B dies, the insurance company refuses to pay, there is outrage when the press reports it and then the law will probably change.
We are getting seriously off-topic here, sorry. I will try to stay on the topic for my next posts in this thread.
Right, there’s some excellent discussions in here I want to reply to (or maybe a mod can split it where relevant as there is some useful stuff for its own thread) but I’m currently AFK on my phone so just wanted to provide a quick update.
The issue was indeed the RCD-B, I accept the temperature rise wasn’t disastrous, but it is more than the new one does. The change in test values was the concerning part.
To their credit, Matt:e dispatched a new RCD-B to me on next day delivery, which has now been fitted for several days and done multiple full current charges over 4 hour periods, so I’m calling the issue fixed
I’m happy to say it is nothing to do with the EVSE tripping it during a self test (as was my initial thought when making OP).
The question now is do I send the faulty one to Big Clive to take apart given it’s a slightly weird failure mechanism neither I, my tamed electrician, CEF or Matt:e had ever heard of as observed.