Posts Tagged ‘electricity’

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Customer Services!

Tuesday, January 31st, 2017

I’m fed up with poor (and that’s me being polite), customer service, so from today in 2017, I’m going to start a list of companies with Good, Bad, and Ugly Customer Services!!!!

So here is my list for January 2017

2017-01-30-21_35_22-microsoft-excel-book1

So congratulations, to those that have made it, in the Good list, hopefully those in the Yellow and Red, can improve in the future….

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An exciting Saturday…. No Electricity or internet for 11 hours and worst of all No Strictly Come Dancing!

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

I’ll set the scene, at the beginning of September (September 5th 2011) 

  1. one of the power supplies on a computers workstation, went bang and failed – reported here on Andysworld!,
  2. another power supply on another workstation, failed – OCZ power supply.
  3. Humax Fox-SAT STB power supply failed – reported here on Andysworld!.
  4. An electronic X10 switch failed which operates the backyard lamp.

Diagnosing the fault with the backyard lamp, I noticed and reported to Boot Ferrule Man, (a qualified Electrician) and my neighbour, the mains voltage coming into the house was 256v AC! (which I suspect had blown and damaged the electronic X10 switch).  Boot Ferrule Man stated that was far too high, and out of tolerence, but when I checked on the internet, I was confused by the reported tolerences of AC voltage supply in the UK. At this time, I had not associated this “possible fault” with the other items 1-3 above.

Saturday 8th October 2011, a neighbour in the shire, knocked on the door at 11.00am, asking if we had, had any damage the previous night (7th October 2011) at 9.00, because a few properties in the shire, had items which had stopped working, lightbulbs, Freeview STB, Washing Machines, Central heating pumps, Sky Boxes, television mast head amplifiers etc

We had not noticed any, issues that evening. they reported the fault to YEDL, later Saturday afternoon (3.15pm), a YEDL Engineer visited our house, and disconnected us, because they found the electrical impedance to the property was at 1.3 ohms, the maximum impedance allowable is 0.35 ohms, and stated that they had tested that day 280V AC, at a few properties, the fault lay in the common neutral to all the houses, and their was a fault outside of the property, possibly due to water ingress into the underground cabling.  I asked the YEDL engineers, what time did they think service would resume, and they stated, the Digging Team was scheduled to arrive at 6.15pm, and they could not do any work, until thy arrived, so they tidied their YEDL VANs! They gave me a time of 10.00pm! I noticed that the YEDL, are going through a re-branding to CE Electric UK. These were some of the labels on the VANs, although they still had YEDL uniforms!

So I decided to power-up the petrol generator for the fish house.

Coincidence you may think, because in April 2010, they were fixing a joint underground, see here.

The YEDL engineers arrived on site, to fix the fault, but had to wait for the “digging team” before they could start work, the digging team eventually arrived at approx 7.30pm, because I just come back from the Chinese with our dinner, to eat in the dark with our headtorches, and my NEW ZEBRALIGHT!, which of course I purchased from my friendly Boot Ferrule Man. ZEBRALIGHT! Review coming soon!

Our electricity was not re-connected and tested until approx 2.30am, so with hindsight, it was a good job, I connected the petrol generator for the fish house, and this is the longest runtime, I’ve had it running 11 hours@3000Watts.

New Impedance tested to house is 0.29 ohms.

A few photos of the event!

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Real-Time Energy Usage Monitor

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Real-Time Energy Usage Monitor is operating again correctly, just been offline since October 2009!

I’ll try and get the temperature guage fixed for the website again.

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No Electricity today!

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

I’m without electricity today, and again YEDL hide behind notifying you 7 days before the electricity is due to be turned off, and you have to make your own arrangements. I understand this is the minimum requirements an electricity provider must meet.

A few weeks ago, every third house in the hamlet, didn’t have any electricity. I have repeatedly notified YEDL about the state of the transformer supplying the hamlet!

transformer2

As you can see it’s covered in ivy! That cannot be good!

A few more exciting pictures…

The water in the holes with eletricity cables canot be any good! Water and electricity don’t usually mix! Also a picture of the generator in the generator shed, supply electricity to the fish house.

Wattson 389 Watts

Wattson 389 Watts

Not been this low for a while, with everything in the house, unplugged, just fridge on!

‘YEDL – Sorry for any Inconvience’ – Umm, me don’t think so!

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Real-Time Energy (electricity) Usage from my Wattson (electric) Smart Meter

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

I’ve updated my Real-Time Energy Usage widget in the right hand side panel to update every 10 seconds.

So if you wait and watch, after 10 seconds, it should change!

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All change!

Monday, May 25th, 2009
Two 48 inch replacement tanks for the fish house
Two 48 inch replacement tanks for the fish house

I’ve not blogged anything about the fish house in a while, because nothing really exciting has happend, and I didn’t think you be interested in feeding the fish, or bi-weekly partial water changes. To conserve electricity, I shut down six small fish tanks in December 2008 (18inch x 10inch x 10inch, and smaller), they were used as quarantine, and for smaller fish, but more recently I’d increased the fish house, by six tanks, so these weren’t really used a great deal. These four fish tanks, were the first four that started the fish house in 2004. Time for a change.

I’ve had three four foot fish tanks in storage since the fish house move of July 2006. One four foot tank would replace these four nicely!

I’ve cleaned, soak tested it for leaks, and painted the sides white with some spare matt emulsion. It’s not the tidest of fish tanks, but it holds water, ideal for the fish house.

Before - fish tanks that will be replaced
Before – fish tanks that will be replaced

These are the four dirty fish tanks in the fish hosue that will be replaced by one single 48x15x12 fish tank. I just noticed that one of the tanks, has a successfuly breeding colony of snails. Most of the time, I’m trying to get rid of these with Clown andCandy loaches, and have successfully removed all snails from the fish house. I’ll keep these in another small tank, so I can rear them for live food for the loaches. (I’ll regret it later, I’m sure).

After - removed!
After – removed! Fish tanks removed.

wires, and new polysterene required, and a bit of tidy up required before I site the replacement fish tank. That’s another day.

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Wattson is well again!

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

After a 3.5 days recuperating  (powered-off), Wattson has managed to get over his sickness! Not a very elegant solution for such a designer object (an un-bent paperclip stuck with blue-tack underneath – to aid reset, and leaving a few days for the batteries to discharge, so wattson forgets his corrupt configuration, to prevent him from freezeing.

Some interesting observations after leaving Wattson unpluged from the DC charger and computer for a total of 3.5 days. Do not be temepted to re-connect to pc or charger at this time (wattson will still be active and freeze!)

After leaving wattson off for 3.5 days, after a power-on, you know wattson is happy again, because it defaults to Colours Only.

Plug back into DC mains charger, connect back to Holmes, and run a collection, the previous days data is still stored, I had 7 days of data before the freeze, Holmes detects Wattson, the data and time is set to 30.11.1999, and it starts to collect all data, and set the tariffs.

Holmes collecting data from Wattson

Holmes collecting data from Wattson

Wattson is now happy again.

Holmes collecting data from Wattson

Holmes collecting data from Wattson

and energy readings will appear again in the side panel.

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Npower Sign Online 15 Electricity Tariff

Friday, April 17th, 2009

A 5 minute telephone call today to Npower has saved me £350 on my electricity bill in switching from Standard to Sign Online 15 Electricity tariff, which is paperless billing, and you send them a meter reading, rather than the “twonk on stupid street” from Meterplus, which always leave a card because I’m out at work, asking me to do it. Who reads their meters, because they are out reading mine!

I could have saved over £550 on my electricity bill, by switching to Web Online 15, but this tariff offered by Npower, is excluslvely to “new customers” only to Npower, so for me to get this, I’ve got to switch to another provider e.g. EDF or E-ON, and then come back to Npower, then they’ll put me on that tariff. Now there’s an idea, maybe I leave and not comeback, as Npower Customer Service doesn’t rank very highly according to the Which? surveys!

Oh, I know my exact electricity usage because Wattson records it, and has been for the last 510 days, so whether it’s per second, minute, day, hour, week, month and year, I have the data!

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Real-time energy widget

Monday, April 6th, 2009

okay, i’ve added the real-time energy widget to the sidebar from myenergyusage.org

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Real-Time Energy Usage on Blog

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Real-time energy usage readout of electricity used in our house is now available for all to see. Average consumption is approx 3000 watts (3kW). If it increases to approx 6000 watts (6kW) then someone in the household has put the kettle or cooker on for tea! Between the hours of 12.30 – 7.30 GMT Economy 7 starts and in the winter the storage heaters turn on, so expect some high wattage readings between these hours.

Just refresh the web-page to see it change.

I blogged about this here.

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