Complaint Department

We have the same here in NW Oakland county, the power goes off, and back on.. just enough to make all the digital displays flash for a reset..

Greg L

Hey John! That's just PSE&G showing you what it will be like if they don't get their bigger power line thru your town.......lol

What's the deal with that? I haven't heard anything lately. I guess if I started following the news again I'd know.

Wood'nCoal wrote:I'm positive there's a guy at JCP&L whose is the designated "annoyance causer". Every so often, for no apparent reason, the power shuts off and then immediately is restored. This has been happening for years here. It's off just long enough to shut down my computers and erase the time from everything that has a digital clock in it.
That guy had his hand on the really big switch again this morning. I think I heard him laughing.

I had a similar situation here. An occasional power flicker that got worst over time. Called my local utility company and got the run around. After a couple of months of calls I finally insisted on talking to the engineering department. The end result was the engineering department ordered a line monitor to be installed on our line. It was installed on my neighbors house by removing the power meter and inserting an adapter plug that went to the recorder. A couple of weeks later they came back and read the results. I just happen to be home when the engineer was looking at the data. We talked about the test. The recorder had a USB flash drive that contained all the data. He inserted it in his laptop and set various trigger criteria. He could see all the drop outs, and look for common events, time, temperature, etc. He concluded it was the transformer feeding our local street. It was changed and upgraded to the next size a couple of days later. Problem solved!

I had a similar situation at the texaco station years ago and it actually caused the power supply in a pc to catch fire! office filled with smoke, new power supply allowed pc to come back and the software i had in for monitoring power issues clearly showed the on and off cycle . It was surging every few seconds at night during peak use times. The netural wire connection on the transformer down the alley was loose and when folks came home from work and powered up thier house.....

it took an act of congress tho to get a concienious enough line man to listen and diagonois the issue....

Yanche that's awesome. I'm glad you got them to take your intelligence and knowledge seriously. I have to run another circuit to my washer and dryer, when I run the machines now my living room floor lamp flickers. My cable signal is messed up since the cable company found my drop amp outside and disconnected it. I have another one inside here hooked up, but sometimes the history channel and the weather channel get screwed up.
This is an old thread! I got some kind of email virus that sent some commercial ad to all my email addresses! It was a link to a place for clothing or something. Avast didn't pick it up and AVG free won't let me upgrade because it knows Avast is in my pc.

Dann757 wrote:Avast didn't pick it up and AVG free won't let me upgrade because it knows Avast is in my pc.

Create a self booting disk "AVG Rescue Disk".

http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-rescue-cd

It runs completely on it's own. Text prompt type interface that uses a Linux-like OS that's on the disk. You will have a choice to download the latest virus database.

We had the same problem here about 8 years ago. Everytime a motor would start such as the A/C, washer etc, the lights would flicker. There are only 5 homes on my road and all were on the same transformer. That was fine in 1950 when these homes were built. Now everyone has much higher loads but the transformer was never bumped up. After going many rounds with BGE and them insisting there was a problem with connections in my panel etc. i finally got them to put a monitor on our house. They are required to maintain a certain voltage range and when they retrived their monitor and read the data, there were many dropouts below the minimum. They didn't put in a larger transformer, they put in a second transformer. One handles two homes and one handles 3. Solved our problem.

I had a strange situation some years ago -- I can't really call it a problem, just strange. There's a transformer and a street light on the pole outside my house. I don't think the transformer serves anyone else but me. I would get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom and flush the toilet. About the time I would get back to the bedroom, I would hear the water pump kick on (240V), and within a second or two the street light would go out, then gradually come back on over 30 seconds more or less. This happened with great regularity night after night.

Mostly from curiosity, I left a voice message with the power company trouble line, but I never heard anything back from them. They probably all had a good laugh over the nut with the crazy imagination. Eventually after a couple years the street light bulb was replaced and the aliens in my well stopped playing with the light.

Why is it that some women cannot grasp the concept of a thermostat?

Apparently it is not a device that automatically senses ambient air temperature and can call for heating or cooling on it's own. In reality it seems it is actually a fancy switch with dials and levers that perform no function whatsoever other then to make using the switch more confusing. I have first hand knowledge of this. When it's too cold the lever-thingy gets pushed up to the big numbers and when it's too hot the lever-thingy gets pushed to the little numbers. This odd behavior occurs mostly during heating season. In the summer with air conditioning it becomes more of turn the a/c on until it's cold in the house, then shut it off until it's hot in the house, repeat process.

Also, did you know that the higher the thermostat is set the faster it will get warm in the house?

Not all women subscribe to or follow this odd procedure, your mileage may vary.

Wood'nCoal wrote:Also, did you know that the higher the thermostat is set the faster it will get warm in the house?

Absolutely!!!

rberq wrote:

Wood'nCoal wrote:Also, did you know that the higher the thermostat is set the faster it will get warm in the house?

Absolutely!!!

The same principle applies in the car. Even if it has climate control!

I have a White-Rodgers mechanical setback thermostat with 2 levers and real mercury switches in it. Behind the levers there is a series of bosses in the plastic mold with a neat little hole in each of them. It's amazing, a little screw fits right into one of those holes and keeps the lever from being pushed above 74°!

One of my friends actually installed one of those locking boxes over the thermostat in his house.

Wood'nCoal wrote:One of my friends actually installed one of those locking boxes over the thermostat in his house.

Grounds for divorce. My wife would take a hammer to it, or to me, depending on her mood.

On a related note, when my kids were little, it took years for them to discover that a light switch has a down position as well as an up. One of them would get up to go to the bathroom at night, and next morning we would find every single light in the house on. Monsters never got him, though!

my kids didn't have to worry about the monsters if they left lights on--if you don't teach em young,you mights just as well whistle dixie later each one of them had a flashlight