Melted my drop from SoCal Edison

[yblaser]

It's a bit of a long story, but we lost power to half our house last night around 2:30am. It seemed like we lost one phase but figured I'd trouble shoot in the morning. Come sunrise I walked outside and saw this:

The drop from the power line melted breaking one of the hots and the neutral. The other hot was barely hanging on. We were pulling slightly above 15 kW (RAV4 and Volt charging along with a pool pump) when the line failed. I don't think that was the direct cause but I'm sure it didn't help. It was actually pretty cool last night and we've pulled higher currents at higher ambient temperatures so I'm a little surprised it failed now.

 

[TonyWilliams]

Not much safety on that one!!

When the power company comes out to fix that, you might have them check out the size of the transformer. Did you notice any voltage drop prior?

 

[yblaser]

Not much safety on that one!!

When the power company comes out to fix that, you might have them check out the size of the transformer. Did you notice any voltage drop prior?

They already fixed it this morning. All that they did was cut out the melted section and respliced it to the panel, although they did a much better splice into the panel than how it was done previously. Our energy monitor does see a voltage drop with draw. For example last night it dropped from 122V to 116V during charging. I don't know how much is a local voltage drop verse a neighborhood drop. Some of that voltage drop is uncorrelated with our power draw so it seems someone else in the neighborhood is drawing a fair amount of power during that time frame as well but don't see how that would affect the failure of our power drop.