If you don't take care of your appliances, no one else will, even in Netherlands

We would like to share an interesting case of using ZUBR MF2 multifunctional relay in the Netherlands! The author of the shield and the article is Alexander, the place of use of the shield is a private house in the suburbs of Amsterdam.

Alexander's review:

A couple of years ago, I decided to update my electrical panel. The previous one was already dated, with old-style fuses.

I searched the internet to see what components can fit in new panels. While doing my research, I noticed that voltage relays are widely used in the post-Soviet space. On the contrary, in Western Europe, nobody uses them. It's impossible to buy them here.

I lived for 8 years in my house and I never noticed any issues with the city power grid voltage. But I decided to monitor it with a voltmeter and discovered that it fluctuates between 210-245 V. It's not critical overall, as in the Netherlands, a variation of plus or minus 10% from the nominal 230 V is allowed. Still, such fluctuations seemed too large for me.

In the long run, with such fluctuations, you never know what problems may arise in the city power grid tomorrow and how far it can deviate from the nominal value. So naturally, after connecting my house to the 3-phase power supply (right after I installed your ZUBR MF2 two years ago), the voltage in two phases started jumping between 180-270 V! The ZUBR MF2 devices began to trigger and sound the alarm. After some investigation, it turned out that our power grid on the main street hadn’t been upgraded since 1978. And when my house started using all 3 phases instead of just one, the old paper insulation on the line burned out, causing these voltage jumps.

In general, this story once again shows that blindly trusting the city's power grid is never a good idea. If you don't take care of your electrical appliances yourself, nobody else will, even in the Netherlands.   Later on, I added a 3-phase load (micro-inverter for solar panels and electric boiler), and I decided to additionally snap a D6 relay to the panel to monitor the phase imbalances.

In short, here's the summary:

• I replaced the old electrical panel with a new one
• The city power grid had a suspiciously large voltage range of 210-245 V, within which the city operates normally
• Deterioration of electrical grids in our suburb (and not only in my area, later I found enough stories on the internet from all over the Netherlands where people had half of their appliances burned due to municipal power grids
• The extreme 3-phase load in the house occurred

That's the story.    Thank you, DS Electronics for saving electrical appliances even in the Netherlands.



With Alexander's permission we add his contacts in case some of you would like to ask him a question or give him advice on the operation of the ZUBR
Author's Facebook
Author's Skype: Alexander Samilyak