Electric Engineers - A question about my home's electrical setup.
Please bear with me as I try to explain this.
I'm currently living at my parent's house in lebanon. Long story short, corrupt government + 15 year civil war = electricity rationing. People only get power from the government for 12 hours a day. For the other 12 hours, people pay the local 'generator guy' for power. My family is lucky enough to be able to afford our own generator. So this is the problem.
(note: I'm not familiar with alot of electrical terminology so I will try my best to explain what I mean. Feel free to ask me to rephrase something if I'm not making any sense.) The generator is a three-phase system, as is our house. The generator has 3 lines, each of which can support a maximum of 30 amps. The way the electrical system in the house is setup is this. Each appliance/outlet is connected to one of the 3 lines. For example. All the AC units are connected to one line, while the washer/dryer and water pumps are on another line.
Occasionally, the generator will turn off because of an overload. When we check the control unit, the load is always very imbalanced. For example, one line would have 28-29 amps (on the brink of overload), while the second one would be just 2 amps, and the third would be 10 or so amps.
Is there anyway we can install some sort of 'load-balancer'? This hypothetical unit would be one extra step in between the generator and the house. It would detect how much total amps are currently in demand, and evenly distribute them between the 3 lines. This would be far more efficient than the current system, and would allow us to turn more things on.
Does such a thing exist? Does this post make any sense whatsover? I wanted to post in r/electricalengineering but that subreddit is dead.
Posted Jun 23, 2012, 11:52 PM UTC