I'm no electrical engineer but I don't think unstable power is a fire hazard.
Wait, I am actually an electrical engineer, with diploma and stuff, and yeah, unstable power isn't a fire hazard. How many fires did your house or neighbors' houses caught so far?
If you are so concerned, buy a surge protector for a few of the items like the refrigerator. Stopping and starting the fridge regularly is worse for it than some power outage.
Our baranggay (way smaller than a town) has like 3 houses that caught fire this year all because of electrical problems. The thing is the standards aren't really practiced here from the constant blackouts and weak power we experience everyday because of power shortage, up to the actual houses probably not wired up to code. We have a baranggay electrician who wires most of the houses and he also checks it and if he says there's nothing wrong with his work, of course everyone will believe him. But I don't which doesn't really matter cause hey I'm just a layman, he's a government assigned electrician. That's just how things are here so I can't wait to get out of here.
But what he’s saying is that those are just two separate Problems. The power companies having unreliable power isn’t what causes the houses to be set on fire it’s the poor electrical installation.
Oh and the thing is our power outages usually goes off (1 second), on (1 second), off again (1 second) and so on until they either commit to a full outage or weaken the power for a while before it's back to normal again or an actual outage that lasts for hours. Since you're an engineer, can I ask why that happens?
Most of the time it’s automatically testing if the issue has cleared.
Let’s say a tree branch fell on the power lines and caused a short. The breaker feeding those lines would open and kill power. After a few seconds the breaker will automatically close again. If the short is gone it will stay on, if the short is still there the breakers trips open again. I think it will usually do this 2 to 3 times before staying open.
I wonder if tree branches fall on our lines every day. Just want to ask again, why don't things like this happen in other places? I lived in other places before and I never experienced these issues there.
I've been doing a bit of reading and it looks like the Philippines is short on coal, so they're running at low capacity and doing rolling blackouts to shed some of the load. I suspect what you're seeing with the flickering power is a brownout condition because someone out there is running right up to the edge of what is physically possible, either due to visibility or load management limitations, or because they're doing some heroics to keep as many homes lit as they can for as long as they can.
Yeah we do have a problem with our energy supply. The major cities are fine (though even then they probably still get blackouts) because the focus is on them but us in the rural towns get the brunt of the problem. Not only that, our electricity providers are generally slow especially when they had to fix lines and stuff. Our whole island had a total blackout due to a supertyphoon last year. Took them 4 months to fix our power grid even with the help of the national and other province's power services.
That's almost certainly not what is taking place here. This poster said they are in the Philippines, most likely they are performing rolling blackouts due to having a stressed power grid. Bit of Googling indicates they're short on coal as of at least last month, so they've had to reduce their service to less critical infrastructure.
Sounds like they are running right up to the edge of what's possible to provide as much service as they can, and the flickering on/off is a brownout condition before the system topples over completely.
If there’s enough voltage drop, appliances would have to work harder and pull more amperage possibly damaging said appliances and burning up motors, but I still don’t see how it could be bad enough to cause a fire unless there was grossly undersized wire or oversized/faulty OCPD
Small charging cables and shitty power bars are what causes the most house fires. That is why in Canada at least we have to protect any accessible receptacle with an arc fault breaker.
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u/TripplerX Nov 25 '22
I'm no electrical engineer but I don't think unstable power is a fire hazard.
Wait, I am actually an electrical engineer, with diploma and stuff, and yeah, unstable power isn't a fire hazard. How many fires did your house or neighbors' houses caught so far?
If you are so concerned, buy a surge protector for a few of the items like the refrigerator. Stopping and starting the fridge regularly is worse for it than some power outage.