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by Scoundreller 410 days ago
What I wanna know is if I could/should have a plug-in box that detects the frequency is drifting and the grid is unstable —-> high risk of imminent failure.

Might even give you clues about something big tripping offline.

Probably lots of false alarms, but if it an outage is particularly bad for you, good to know as soon as the system operators do.

Obviously over the internet could work too, but who wouldn’t love their own box?
3 comments
vel0city 409 days ago
> Probably lots of false alarms, but if it an outage is particularly bad for you, good to know as soon as the system operators do.

When the phase gets pulled down hard like what nearly happened in Texas and what probably happened here, it'll go from looking like the background noise of phase changes to catastrophic in just a few seconds. It isn't like you'll get warning an hour ahead of time. You'll probably notice your computer monitor going dark before your grafana graph refreshes.

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baq 410 days ago
no worries, the energy utility does that for you. they care, because if they don't, their hardware bursts into flames.
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Denvercoder9 410 days ago
> What I wanna know is if I could have a plug-in box that detects the frequency is drifting

Yes, it's not that hard. There's smart meters and plugs that have frequency measurement built in.

You can even do it with an audio cable: https://halcy.de/blog/2025/02/09/measuring-power-network-fre...

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0cf8612b2e1e 409 days ago
Old school electric clocks used to (still?) keep time with the grid frequency. Guaranteed to always have N cycles per day. So if things are gradually failing, you might be able to see your clock keeping worse time.
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crote 409 days ago
That's not going to work, because the clock will mainly be showing phase drift.

Having the grid operate at 49.99Hz instead of a perfect 50.00Hz for a day will make your clock lose 17 seconds, but it's completely harmless. That's normal regulation, not a gradual failure. The grid chooses to compensate for that by running at 50.01Hz for a day, but that's solely for the benefit of those people with old-school clocks - the grid itself couldn't care less.

A failure means the frequency drops from 50.23Hz to 48.03Hz, probably within a single second. You'd notice as your clock stops ticking due to the resulting power outage.

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