Sunny Spain

[FDJ]

Note that all mcb's are type C and with a 25A incommer, there is no effective discrimination.
Its a good job the incommer is type C!

In Spain, they seem to accept regular trips in exchange for a lower tariff. I don't think I would.
F.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

AIUI there's a similar regime in France, and the financial incentive to opt for a low limit is compelling.

But they have something more sophisticated than an MCB to monitor the load, and most (? some?) people have load shedding relays to prevent being cut off.

Anyway - it'll be coming to you whether you fancy it or not - on the smart metering roadmap are smart appliances and capped tariffs. If it's done properly and the cap isn't stupidly low then it won't be too bad. Electric showers would become a no-no, but there's not much wrong with, for example, switching off the washing machine heater while the kettle boils, or turning off a cooking appliance when the fridge/freezer compressor kicks in etc. Think about your house - ignore the electric shower if you have one - what's your real maximum demand, and how frequent and long are the times where it actually exceeds a few kW?

 

[ricicle]

.... for example, switching off the washing machine heater while the kettle boils, or turning off a cooking appliance when the fridge/freezer compressor kicks in etc.

But that won't save energy, it will just lower the instantaneous demand on the system. The amount of energy required to fulfil the requirements of boiling a kettle, cooking a roast, heating the washing machine and cooling the fridge/freezer will still be the same.
Perhaps the savings will come from a totally lower rated electrical infrastructure ie smaller generators, transformers and cables.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

It's the gap between instantaneous capacity and demand which needs to be closed. This is not about saving customers money - it's about demand management as a way to avoid building generating capacity.

 

[Adam_151]

There will be financial incentives as well, your dinner will cost a lot more to cook at 4pm on a sunday afternoon, than 4am on a sunday morning, IIRC they already have the ability to do this to any installation fitted with a new smart meter. As well as remotely switch off the supply if they need to in order to create rolling blackouts in times of shortages (but they like to keep the existance of the contactors in them hushed up a bit )

Its unfortunatly going to necessary as a lot of generating stations reach end of life... unless they rush through some more nuclear plants.

Having exported some load monitoring data from an OWL monitor over a perioid of a few weeks, or a large domestic with gas heating, gas hob, electric oven, and no electric shower in use 25A max demand isn't unacheiveable. WIth smart appliances that can probably be cut a lot more. Perhaps we shouldn't atcually worry about 16mm tails on 100A cutout in domestics unless theres storage heaters or shower, the demand isn't there to cause a problem

 

[ban-all-sheds]

It's a bit tricky to "rush through" any sort of power station, let alone nuclear ones.