Electric Co limited power

 Is it possible to limit the amount of power going into a home, by the energy
company, so as to create a short circuit knocking off a line or two?
...limit sorta like when the phone company disables long distance when you
haven't paid the full balance until eventually it's completely cut off...

thanks, sorry if the question is absurd

  A fuse.

 

A fuse?   assume all circuit breakers/cables, etc. are in perfect
functioning order...

so I'm asking from any point outside the home is it possible to limit the
amount of kilowatts supplied to a home limiting the amount of
circuits/appliances that can operate at one time.

am I even asking it correctly, i'm not sure

 

edel wrote:


The short answer is 'yes and no'.

The phone company analogy is a poor one - phone lines in a central
office are allowed/disallowed access to various toll circuits based on
bill payment history as read from a customer/account database.
Eventually, you are not even allowed access to dial tone, but all of
this is determined by the central office configuration, not the
characteristics of the pair of wires to your home.

In power distribution, theoretically, the available power to your home
is infinite, up to the maximum that the pole transformer can supply on a
sustained basis.

As you draw more energy from the power line (from the pole transformer,
through your supply feeder and into your circuit breaker panel and then
to the various connected circuits, and assuming that you draw no more
than the rating of the circuit breakers, the line voltage will drop a
bit - in the event of a serious overload, either one of your circuit
breakers will trip to relieve load, or if there is a short circuit in
your feeder line prior to the main breaker, then the fuse or cutout on
the pole transformer will open, cutting off your power. It's all or nothing.

There's no 'throttling' of your individual power line supply to limit
consumption to a set amount other than the fusing mentioned above - if a
group of customers or area starts drawing more than the grid can supply,
then there may be 'droop' in the district supply that amounts to a
voltage lowering (through I2R losses in the primary supply conductors -
otherwise known as a 'brown-out' - and everybody's electricity is
affected equally.

"Load shedding', or dropping off power consumers to be able to sustain
some capacity rather than losing _all_ of it is applied on a regional
basis, not individual households.

Probably more confusion than explanation, but that's usenet!

Carla

 

   Not so, at least not here in Florida.  Here, you can sign up for a special
program that allows the utility to shut off your big loads on an individual
basis as needed.  They put a box in your house and communicate with it via your
phone line.  They only need to activate the system in times of extra-heavy load.
Those consumers that allow the system to be installed receive a discount on
their power bills.

Vaughn