Power cut, lights only, South East London

so probably not the greatest title to get people interested but I thought this was worth putting up, in case it's more than it seems.

so a couple of nights ago, Tuesday 8th at about 10:40pm UK time, I'm sat at home with the TV on, looking at FB on the tablet, and the lights go off.
nothing unusual there. They came back on again after about 2 seconds - long enough for me to wonder what had just happened.
TV was still on, nothing else seemed to have been affected, but all the lights in the house went off.

yesterday I go online and find a post on the local forum, someone asking if there had been other people with power cuts last night, at about the same time, ok so a local power cut, nothing odd there, but then everyone else said it was also 'just the lights went out'.

someone had put a link to the 'report a fault' on UKPN (U K Power Networks) website, I reported it just before leaving work, and 20 minutes later got a phone call from UKPN. They said that if it was just the lights, then that's usually an internal issue inside the house, he asked if we'd had any rewiring done, or building works recently, and said that it's usually a tripped switch. I asked why it would affect lots of houses and he evaded the question. He said that if there had been something affecting lots of houses it would have shown up on their systems. which it hadn't. He said if it was a UKPN issue, it would have turned everything off, and clocks would have reset, and alarms gone off etc. but nothing like that had happened. It was just the lights, and it was many houses across a full postcode area of London (possibly wider).

so is this explainable? could it have been a 'brown out' of some sort? Why just the lights, and not other electrical stuff?

Did anyone else notice this?

I am going to hazard a guess here, do you have Smart Meters or just plain old analog?

The smart meters power can be conserved by killing systems that do not have terminal plugs, so the lights would go out but the Tvs, Alarm chronographs, cooler boxes would not.

There is a second problem with smart meters though, they are wifi accessible and make a kind of sub network among themselves.

You could have saw a flex test by the electric service provider, or maybe even an outside influence, under either case the ESP will not let on they have that ability or that they got compromised.

Mind that is only a hazarded guess from what I know about smart meters.

CoBaZ

Got any link to these forums and this report,

Might be helpful to keep the conversation going.

For very short things like a few seconds of power outage quite often is caused by scrotes trying to nick cable, TV's and quite a bit of other stuff actually can handle it as they're built to operate in most places in the world even where power can be rather dodgy so they spec enough in the capacitors etc to hold enough charge to be able to handle a few seconds worth of power loss.

The loss of lights will be due to them having to reroute power to your local substation and while its generally computerishly controlled the actual effort can take a second or two as its 10's of thousands of volts running into oil cooled isolators.

People only notice its lights out as they're on their battery powered kit and even if their router stops working it'll switch to a 3g/4g connection straight away and as such you are not affected, the only other time they may notice is if their microwave/cooker/bedroom alarm clock etc has suddenly lost its time but quite often they're built as well to handle a 1-2 second blip.

a reply to: CrastneyJPR

The way UK homes are wired is important.

There is only one supply line to the house. Once it gets to the meter box, it is split into Power, Lights, etc etc.

If only the lights went out, then it is either smart meters being tested or there is something very wrong in the suburb!

So who is flexing their muscles on a test. Testing reactions perhaps? Or a white hat letting you see just a glimpse of what smart meters can d0.

P

a reply to: CrastneyJPR

Don't know if this means anything but I have a pen pal friend up in Preston and she said they lost power there also. I'm not up on the English landscape but isn't that a few miles from London? Do storms in England usually affect a large area like that? When she told me it was just a weather story. After reading yours, makes one wonder just a bit.

a reply to: CrastneyJPR

I am pretty sure I am wrong on this but your TV(flatscreen at a guess) Will have a transformer to drop the voltage whereas your lights are hardwired 230v.

Just wondered if there was a drop in voltage enough to take the lights out but too quick to affect the tv as it had residual power in the transformer and kept it on until the power came back?

I would not trust a "smart" meter myself it sounds like it could be misused by the electric company

Edit: Just realised someone said the same thing above.

That could have been caused by a lightning strike on the power lines. The lighting hits the power line, causing an energy surge. Isolation switches trip on that segment of cable trip, causing that segment of power line to be cut off from the grid, grounded to earth and then reconnected. The same thing would happen if a tree fell on a power line.

Electrical appliances are designed to handle sudden changes of power, but lights would just flicker or dim a bit.

a reply to: stormcell

I am pretty sure that here in the UK when an RCD on the main fuse box trips it stay of unless you manually turn it back on again.

Interesting theory though.

not on a smart meter as far as I know.
all fuse switches untripped still in 'on' position.
Preston is close, by USAn standards, but effing miles away by UK standards.

forum is Sydenham Town Forum but you might need a log in to see this thread...?

7 of us posted - not a huge number, but probably a small fraction of those who experienced it.

You shouldn't trust the average person on the end of the DNO's helpdesk as they know pretty much nothing about how the systems built and maintained.

1-2 seconds is pretty common for systems to reroute in the event of a failure as it'll probably have to be serious to cause a substation to trip and reroute the power, any reports of pikeys nicking cable or some drunk idiot running into a substation?

The only reason you noticed the lights would of been your TV has enough capacitors in it etc to last a second or so (always test it by switching off/on the socket) and you wouldn't of noticed it for fridges/freezers etc as they'll be at temperature normally so wouldn't of made much difference to them and perhaps only a digital alarm clock or the timer on the microwave/cooker would be a giveaway for such a small blip and even then they may have enough capacity to be able to handle a 1 second blip

The reason it takes such a time of around a second is that the grid is synchronized at 50hz and if that gets messed up it can cause all sorts of problems especially with motors.