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Power Line Quality Monitor that does not cost a fortune

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Gregg:
Neal,
A few other things worth checking:

Is the wire from the drop to the meter and from the meter to the main breaker aluminum?  If so, most of your problems may be bad connections behind the meter.  An infrared thermal camera may find bad connection problems at the meter and breaker panel easier than other methods. 

Another test is to load one 115V leg of the 230V system as much as possible with things like toasters, plug in heaters etc. up to about 50 amps and check the voltage drop on that leg as well as the other 115V leg. Check on the meter side of the main breaker.  If the loaded leg voltage drops significantly and the other leg voltage increases approximately the same amount, there may be a bad neutral connection at the pole pig or even too small of a transformer capacity.

While a leg is loaded, also check the voltage drop across the main breaker and all other breakers in the panel.

Also make sure that the neutral and ground are bonded in only one location (usually in the main breaker panel) otherwise you can have circulating neutral / ground currents that will drive you cray trying to locate.  If possible, use a clamp meter on the ground wires from branch circuits to look for neutral currents returning via the ground instead of the neutral conductor.

Gregg

tablet_monkey:
Compelling solution,

https://hackaday.com/2024/12/02/esp32-powers-diy-smart-energy-meter/

5U4GB:

--- Quote from: tautech on March 19, 2022, 01:07:47 am ---Whattabout a $499 DSO with logging ?
https://siglentna.com/application-note/datalogging-with-the-four-channel-sds1000x-e-oscilloscope-models/

--- End quote ---

Given that this appears to be a rather intermittent issue, wouldn't that leave you with potentially hundreds of hours worth of mostly nothing that you need to dig the glitches out of?  The advantage of a dedicated device is that it'll capture the anomaly and skip all the boring bits.

5U4GB:

--- Quote from: threephase on March 19, 2022, 08:52:50 am ---Cheapest Instrument I know of is the OM-DVCV from Omega, that will give you 1 second sample rate.

https://www.omega.com/en-us/data-acquisition/data-loggers/specialty-data-loggers/om-dvcv-logger/p/OM-DVCV

--- End quote ---

For something like that an even cheaper option would be to get a Modbus power meter like the Eastron SDM-230s, those will read two dozen or more parameters and you can poll them as fast as the serial link will allow, then discard everything that's nothing-to-see-here and only report the anomalous conditions.

tautech:

--- Quote from: 5U4GB on December 04, 2024, 02:06:29 pm ---
--- Quote from: tautech on March 19, 2022, 01:07:47 am ---Whattabout a $499 DSO with logging ?
https://siglentna.com/application-note/datalogging-with-the-four-channel-sds1000x-e-oscilloscope-models/

--- End quote ---

Given that this appears to be a rather intermittent issue, wouldn't that leave you with potentially hundreds of hours worth of mostly nothing that you need to dig the glitches out of?  The advantage of a dedicated device is that it'll capture the anomaly and skip all the boring bits.

--- End quote ---
Herein lies the power of a DSO trigger and Search function.  ;)

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