small village huge power cut faulty local new sub station apparently.why so much damage to appliances?

Question

fault occured on local sub station, loads of people experiencing weird electrical faults, e.g. lighting circuit dimming, appliances nearly setting alight fault etc.some had to ring for fire dept, many people have lost there tv due to the fault .electricity board not giving detail of fault they just say that it is rare ,also specialist engineers where called out .could the fault be the transformer or domestic side.overvoltage/current why has this fault occured?

Answer 1

Neutral conductor has not been correctly connected / or a fault has damaged the main neutral conductor.

The electricity board will say as little as possible so that it is not misunderstood.

Very dangerous situation,caused either by an old network or most likely by someones mistake.

Answer 2

LeAnne is correct if netural is broken on load side of the load panel of the house, and gound is also lost to the panel, but not each other. But most houses only bring in two phases and ground. The netural only runs back to the load center.

If there are several industries that use all three phases, and many loads are phase to phase, and one phase is dropped at the sub station, surges and spikes can occur in those phases as loads stop and start as the volatge fluctuates.

Most likely a surge could happen by a faulty autotransformer not regulating properly, or highly fluctuating loads (such as heavy machinery being started and stopped frequently) that the auto transformer has difficulty adjusting to.

Again--all are rare, but more likely when a system is operating near it's maximum capacity.

Answer 3

Don't know if this was the fault, but an open neutral will cause the available voltage of one branch to travel through an appliance to another appliance on a different branch resulting in a total potential of 240 volts across both appliances.
This will most probably let the smoke out of both affected appliances.

Answer 4

Some expert has connected up one of the three phases wrongly in a joint box.
The dim lot was fed by earth and leaking earth, the bright bunch phase and leaking earth.
OK I am wrong, the transformer's output was incorrectly wired in the same way.
Call in another expert and sue them.
Get in Health and Safety and have the guy jailed.
You are entitled by law.
Better yet tell Prescott he's the one dishing out the certs.

Answer 5

We had a similar experience a few months back with a drop and surge in the local grid - most of our 'newer' electronics (2-3 years old) glitched in one way or another, resetting, dropping signals or losing saved data. The engineer from the power company told me that EVERY socket in the house should be fitted with surge protection in case of this sort of thing.

I didn't fully understand the technical terms, but it sounded like the design of subtation in use automatically shuts down if it's hit by a power surge from downline, but the restart cycle causes another surge in a sort of cascade effect.

Answer 6

Alien activity.