Can I Isolate This Setup?

[Jurassicspark]

I've seen some single phase installations with a 3 phase isolator.

 

[JohnW2]

I've seen some single phase installations with a 3 phase isolator.

No reason why not - if one wants to spend a fair bit more than necessary

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Yes. Why else would I need a 3P+N isolator?

You might just have a 3P+N to hand?

 

[veedee]

you could buy and fit a suitable isolator, just screwed in place, and ask them to wire it in when they do the meter swap.

Sound like my arm would be twisted into getting a 'smart' meter.. urrrgh.

When I had my smart meter fitted last year, I asked for an isolator to be fitted as well.
The guy was happy to do it for free, but wouldn't have done so if I hadn't asked.

To do this, don't they need to pull the main cutout fuse?

So, would the DNO need to attend for this?

Before the smart meter we could remove the fuse wearing appropriate PPE and often the seals were already missing so no one knew the wiser, but the smart meter is suppose to auto inform the DNO of a power cut, not sure if they really do that, but they should, so one can't remove the fuse as it would flag up as a power cut.

I think this is all baloney.

Classic fear mongering in order to prevent people from pulling their fuses, removing meters etc..

Kinda like how they used to say that Tv Licence inspectors could detect whether the TV's on from outside the building in their van

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

I think this is all baloney.

If it goes well, yes. However if it goes wrong it can be deadly - do you feel lucky?

 

[Alan 483256]

To do this, don't they need to pull the main cutout fuse?

Yes, that's what the guy did.

He was very friendly and didn't at all mind me sitting next to him going "Are you allowed to remove that big fuse", "what's that bit for", "what are you doing now" etc. etc.

 

[Adam_151]

Kinda like how they used to say that Tv Licence inspectors could detect whether the TV's on from outside the building in their van

That was actually possible, and whats more they could tell what channel was being watched. Its possible to pick up leakage of the intermediate frequency from the local oscilator in the TV, and if you do it with a directional attenna you can pin point which house to some degree.

Unfortunatly it didn't actually get used all that much, because asside from not being admissable in court, they found that the effort of the engineers designing the equipment was largely wasted, all they needed to do was drive one of the vans slowly down a street where not many of the properties were licensed on a Saturday morning, and they'd all be at the postoffice on monday morning tea break building a TV license..... So in the end, they did just start sign writing empty vans as detector vans, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done, they had just found they didnt actually need to

These days it wouldnt be quite so easy, the intermediate frequency would only give you the digital multiplex not the actual chanel, and I'm sure EMC rules mean less leakage from the local oscillator

As to the smart meters, yes, loss of power will be logged, but I think if its just a one off event and no other tamper signals are logged then its not worth the effort in following up who removed a fuse to change a DB, of course if someone was upto no good, I'm sure every logged event would be in a file for when they got done for it.

There is a difference between what its technically possible to do, and what its worth expending time and energy doing

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Unfortunatly it didn't actually get used all that much, because asside from not being admissable in court, they found that the effort of the engineers designing the equipment was largely wasted, all they needed to do was drive one of the vans slowly down a street where not many of the properties were licensed on a Saturday morning, and they'd all be at the postoffice on monday morning tea break building a TV license..... So in the end, they did just start sign writing empty vans as detector vans, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done, they had just found they didnt actually need to

I heard they only had 6 actual vehicles, to cover the entire country. A more effective strategy, was to simply knock at the door of a house with no licence, and/or see if an in use TV could be seen operating through a window.

 

[JohnW2]

You might just have a 3P+N to hand?

In theory, yes - but given that I usually do not work on electrical installations other than my own (and certainly never on other 3-phase installations), it's probably unlikely that I would have a 3P+N isolator 'to hand' if I didn't have a 3-phase installation

 

[SUNRAY]

That was actually possible, and whats more they could tell what channel was being watched. Its possible to pick up leakage of the intermediate frequency from the local oscilator in the TV, and if you do it with a directional attenna you can pin point which house to some degree.

Unfortunatly it didn't actually get used all that much, because asside from not being admissable in court, they found that the effort of the engineers designing the equipment was largely wasted, all they needed to do was drive one of the vans slowly down a street where not many of the properties were licensed on a Saturday morning, and they'd all be at the postoffice on monday morning tea break building a TV license..... So in the end, they did just start sign writing empty vans as detector vans, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done, they had just found they didnt actually need to

These days it wouldnt be quite so easy, the intermediate frequency would only give you the digital multiplex not the actual chanel, and I'm sure EMC rules mean less leakage from the local oscillator

As to the smart meters, yes, loss of power will be logged, but I think if its just a one off event and no other tamper signals are logged then its not worth the effort in following up who removed a fuse to change a DB, of course if someone was upto no good, I'm sure every logged event would be in a file for when they got done for it.

There is a difference between what its technically possible to do, and what its worth expending time and energy doing

As an ex BT engineer...

Yes the technology was there, yes the IF was detectable from outside the property, yes the directional antennae could triangulate extremely acurately, even to TV sets back to back each side of a wall. Some versions detected the CRT emissions which could just about (but only just) be reconstructed to the point it could be compared to a valid TV image. (Further on this, more recently this system was used to remotely read CRT computer monitors).

BT had a fleet of maybe 20 vans set up as detector vans, painted pale blue at the time I knew them (I understand other colours were used at different times) and signwritten and they would travel the country to flood an area, (typically 6 vehicles in 3 adjacent towns for a week) local staff would be seconded to the team for3 or 4 weeks and yes I volunteered for the task on 2 ocassions in early 80's (extremely lucrative to work 4.30-11pm 7 days a week overtime, IIRC worked out to be ~100hrs/week on top of standsrd pay), there was always 3 people in each van. I never knew a dummy van, ie they were all active detectors, however such vans existed.

The vans mostly had tinted windows, just enough that the image on screens showed through.

There were more tactics involved than just slowly driving along a road .

Housing estates usually had a parade of shops, typically; butcher, hardware shop, chemist, post office, grocer etc and we would simply go into the bakers or grocers and buy something and hopefully get chatting to the assistant saying something like 'We'll be around for a week' and the following day go into a different parade saying 'my colleague came in yesterday and said you do nice doughnuts' and go on to say we'd caught XX (insert random number) without a licence yesterday.

Simply sitting outside a popular place like restaurant or pub for an hour eating our chips.

One tactic was to visit someone with a very recently purchased licence in the hope the message that he was really lucky gets passed around.

But one of the simplest by far was to see a colour TV in use where they had a monochrome licence and take a polaroid photo. Colour sets were positioned in such a way to boast. Knocking on the door was always the story they had only just changed it and not had chance to get to the post office etc.

After detecting an unlicenced set in use, knocking on the door nearly always resulted in the purchase the following day, a follow-up letter if not was also successful.

There was often a tie-up with others too, people like 'the white tide man' would chat with the customer and mention seeing us.

The detected signal in itself was not grounds for prosecution but the information gleaned from it was admissable as grounds to conduct the investigation. I would get a report of statistics about 3 months after a session, prosecution was only ever a very few, maybe less than one per week. The whole object of the exercise was to get licences purchased and the presence of the vans successfully made amazing inroads into the deficiency.

Anyway a big deviation, I'll leave it at that.