This has been used in Germany for decades, mainly for load balancing and switching on/off night storage heating systems ("Nachtspeicheröfen"), in conjunction with two-tariff electricity meters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they did lots of experimentation with this technique, like even alarming the fire department, or remotely switching off the mains for customers that didn’t pay. As far as I know, they used a lot of different protocols (Decabit was one of them), the local electricity board decided which was used. I believe this is still now used to limit power injection from third parties into the network, i.e. from solar or wind parks (everything that could inject more than 30 kW). The German name for this is "Rundsteuertechnik", and it uses frequencies between 167Hz and 2kHz, with an amplitude of 1-8% of the nominal mains voltage (limited to max. 9%). The Zellweger company (now part of the Swiss Ascom holding) developed the Decabit protocol in the 1960s. It has a start pulse "SI" plus 10 (thus "deca") pulses of 600ms each, so each command is 6.6s in length. Pulses are always followed by a pause, so a 5-of-10 combinations are possible. Now for n=10, m=5, n! / ((n - m)! * m!) = 252. Since commands are always "double commands" (for on/off, signified by a "+" or "-"), effectively 126 double-commands can be sent using Decabit. This is the reason why your device flashed "error" for some codes. Codes 0..126 should be valid for Decabit, "+" for "on" and "-" for "off". Let’s take the Decabit command "011+", which would be "11010101010" (SI+1.I+2.I .. +10.I). The corresponding "off" command "011-" should be "10101010101", if I remember correctly. It has the pulses inverted, only I can’t quite remember if SI and the pause pulses had to be inverted, too. I _seem_ to remember SI stayed a "1" but all 10 pulses had to be inverted. Interesting find!
It's now also used for Photovoltaik Systems greater than 30kWp. The can can regulate the produced power in 100/60/30/0% steps to stabilizer the grid or in "emergency" situations. At certain sizes (Don' quote me at the exact number) you are also required to have a UPS so the system stays active in case of a complete blackout. This is because you can't have (in the extreme case) for example having a 2+ MWp plant starting injecting full power when you have starting up the grid again.
And also for decades this signal is coupled in analog amplifiers. Very annoying... I might've cassette recordings from decades ago with this signal recorded.
I think those wires were left over from some troubleshooting session that was interrupted. The wires probably went to a bench power supply or multimeter. I guess they intended to come back to it, later so they left the wires in.
In my country Slovenia, my house had a I guess a similar type of injector, right next to the power meter, and apparantly it injected the switchover signal to the entire street. Of course since It was in our house and my grandfather was a electritian, he wired up a switch to the boiler and to the injector, where when you turned on the boiler, it would switch over to the cheaper electricity. It worked flawlessly until someone from the street complained that they were paying too little (how stupid can you be to complain about that) and the electric company showed up, saw what was going on and yeah you can imagine what followed. Anyway that happened some 20-30 years ago, well before I was born.
A little while ago in Plekhanovo, a gypsy village in the Tulskij oblast the entire village was stealing gas and electricity and they weren't paying their bills. So the power company came with riot police, cut their gas and power. And then on top of everything came court bailiffs and confiscated their property. Flat screen TVs, jewelry etc. The gypsies of course acted out and were arrested.
That doesn't make sense. Unless he was triggering the injector during the day, then everybody's boiler would turn on and be charged at the higher tariff.
For future reference guys, don't list what DIP switches to turn on like this 1:13. Show the individual switches like 00001010 or even - - - - 1 - 1 -. It is so much quicker and easier and you can see *patterns* easily.
In Britain it is done by a signal sent over the BBC R4 LW network on 192kHz, this frequency being able to be picked up in most of the UK from it's 3 main transmitters at Droitwich (main), Burghead and Westerglen (I would have thought that the two aforementioned Scottish relays would relay this information as well). There are/were? also a few small relays as well. The device connected to the meter is a radio teleswitch, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch This service will run until the R4 LW transmitter at Droitwich uses up it's last spare transmitting valve as the BBC won't either have new valves made or the transmitters replaced. In Britain the only real users of this system are people who have to use electric night storage heaters for one reason or another, as even with the off-peak rate gas is still cheaper.
I don’t know how much this is actually used nowadays. I’m on an Economy 7 tariff (7 being the number of off peak hours) and ours just switches to off peak according to a time, no teleswitch. It’s consistently 00:36 - 07:36.
dglcomputers I always wondered if they still used a similar system here in the Old Dart, but according to your post, apparently not. ;) (I'd noticed the lights often dimmed at peak times like 9pm, but it seemed more like an intentional dimming time of around half a second, rather than the switchover for nighttime use. Or maybe one of our neighbours is powering up a Cray. lol) hackaday.com/2016/12/06/decabit-or-the-conspiracy-theory-that-wasnt/ Interesting system / device / vid / reply.
First Wikipedia link follows later in comment. Second. I thought someone would probably mention him. And go to the Wikipedia page as far as you might recognize the name associated with who took the pictures. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but I kind of doubt it. The channel name is very close to the persons named head took it taking the pictures. Also for anyone interested here is a link to the Wikipedia article that is spoken about in this video. Third. I Indian see on one of the Eevee ball. Channels? Videos about it was one of the videos on his solar install Dave Jones that is. And they were talking about the old zillweger relay. And also it was one of the ones that had the radioactivity issue. By the way, it's not just radium. It's also trinium as well. I just got done reading the Wikipedia article, by the way. Had it bookmarked from before. When I first heard about the residual your system on the other channel you mentioned. Here's the Wikipedia link. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak?wprov=sfla1 I remember. Here in the United States. Where my parents used to live their first house they owned. Two things. It was kind of similar except different. A lot of houses at least at that time down there had to meter sockets. Even though that were single residence. The Normal meter was in one. Wish served everything except one purpose. The second meter. Was connected to the electric hot water heater. There was a separate safety switch. That had 2 30 amp Edison plug fuses in it for the 220 volts ac 60 hertz power for the water heater. Also Is that meter had a timer built-in to the Fishbowl. AKA glass meter housing. It was really long compared 2 the standard meter.. It had a timer. With strippers that were set internally That could not be adjusted. Precept when Demeter was put together. But since this was an AC synchronous motor timer. There was originally a cover. That would foot down over the whole to set the time. But the outer part was there, but evidently that had broken off years before We moved in. No evidence of tampering or either. Also I remember as well. The water meters were in the basements. Of the houses. And other buildings. Although in some places they were in manholes. But you would have this little black box on the side of your house. It had what looked like a trident logo on it. And there's a wire that ran from that inside. And that connects to the water meter. The older ones have seven wires. And I newer ones had either three or four wires can't remember which. How do I know this? I was always interested in mechanical stuff utilities. I was really into stuff like that. And I'm also a maker. What it be in La Puente near even. But with how I found out I actually asked what the meter readers once about the system. She explained the whole thing to me pretty cool. By the way, people that knew me that worked in various places or companies and found out those ended stuff and could use sings to salvage. Oh, yeah. Also like with the water heater off off-peak train times at least in Wisconsin. Later on, we had an off-peak electric meter. Is that would just charge two different rates at different times. It was a more modern meter. Other than that, I don't remember what it look like. Also, I remember in Tennessee. It was not a smart meter, but it just had a digital display. By the way, this was well over 20 years ago. also in Tennessee where my grandparents lived. On the farm. The electric hot water heater for the house. however, not in the dairy barn. at the breaker panel. Had this gray box attached to it. Big rectangular thing. That was an off-peak load switch for the water heater. Much later on it had been disconnected and removed. Also, I do believe those. A gray units there about the same size as a u.s. electric meter. Often seen sometimes on power poles. But for what purpose? I never could quite figure out for what? Are next to central air units in some places. Are the same sort of thing. I remember one time seeing something like that in a surplus catalog. I do know I do know there's some sort of load control. Anybody got any info on these? I'm not going to find what they are anywhere.
Back in the 80's, the power lines in my old neighborhood made a buzzy sound around top of each hour at night. I think ballasts in street lights may have resonated with some kind of signal imposed on the mains. I thought I might hear something related to that someday...THANX !
I remember when it used to be a thing here in the US. Power companies used to push it as demand switching and generally things like your electric tank style hot water heater would be put on a box with a relay in it, or some cases they used it to control the power to the outside unit for central air conditioning, etc. Then if there was a high demand event, like a super hot day and everyone is cranking the AC they could issue a command to shut off demand appliances to help the grid from overload. I don't see these anymore or hear it mentioned at all. The power companies used to do it here as an incentive, if you let them put it on your appliances they would give you a reduced cost or annual kickback. The bad thing i do remember is when they discontinued the program where i live, just about everyone had it on their hot water heater because there was a large push to save money by allowing it back in the day. It was a small box next to the breaker panel with three LED's in a small window on the front door, there was a green for operating, a green for appliance power on, and a red for appliance power off. What happened when they abandoned the system was they issued one final command to tell all the demand units to turn ON and stay on. So every one of these boxes were defaulted to just sitting there powering a relay inside that was turned on 24/7. So they were just wasting power, albeit a small amount, to run the board inside and keep that relay on all the time. The problem was they wired them so the appliance was on the NO terminal, so they had to be commanded to switch the relay ON or in the case of a power outage when the box reset it would turn the relay back on, i remember the box even had a label on it that said if the appliance wouldn't come on and there was not a demand event or if the appliance was needed during a demand event to power cycle the box, and it would default the relay back to on. The problem was after years of sitting idle the relay's started failing and dropping out and everyone was coming home to either no hot water or no AC at some point. Countless numbers of these were removed by local electricians as the local power municipality refused to take responsibility for they abandoned installs, and since people didn't want to pay an electrician most would open them up find the wires going to the hot water heater or whatever appliance and remove the two line wires from the relay and connect them with a wire nut and leave the box in place or take the output wire and put it on the input wire screw terminal to connect them leaving the box still powered and still consuming power via its transformer on the PCB inside, until eventually the units completely failed and died or in some cases even caught fire. Most people however were smart enough to remove both the line wires completely from the relay and leave the wire to the power supply on the PCB out of the wire nut, it had two wires on the supply side, the one from the breaker supplying the appliance one to a short jumper that went to the PCB to power it and people though it just needed to be there but some would remove power to the box and just leave it there as a junction box for the water heater for eternity! I have replaced water heaters where the box was still there, some even still powered with their LED's lit 20+ years since they were last in use. Most have been removed or just bypassed and left to collect dust these days, but they are a relic you still find in some basements near the breaker panel or water heater.
Still in use in NZ - you get a discount on your monthly power bill if you have your hot water "controlled" and certified. Big power consumers can also negotiate discounts by connecting things like water pumps etc using ripple control where the local power board can switch on and off heavy users. With many different codes, covering different industries they have options about who to prioritise. Eg. Crop irrigation might be a low priority so they might turn that off first and irrigators use a special code specific for them. Residential water boilers in my city have four codes and the electrician is told to choose a random one of the four codes when programming them so the power board can switch on/off boilers in random steps to ease the load so it doesnt all come on at once. Street lamps use another couple of codes - high priority and low priority so they can switch off some after midnight though with the change to LEDs they save so much power that they just have a light sensor on each one and they dont need to shed the load anymore. Air conditioning is only becoming common in the last 10 years here so they havent really done much with them though i like the idea that freezers and fridges could be designed with water compartments that freeze during the night to ease the load during the day similar to night store heaters but cooling your fridge instead of heating. Same with washing machines etc. You should be able to set your washing machine to or dryer to start their cycle when they recieve the next off-peak commence code.
In France this is still used, although now it's the meter which receives the signal and activates a relay and switches the tarif. Before the newer meters came in you had a little box on the fuse board that connected to a relay controlling the hot water tank. I think it's in the 190 Hz range superimposed over 50 Hz. They also have other frequencies that can, depending on the contract, vary multiple tarifs or activate relays for load control. I remember once when I was in a Rte (French transmission operator) sub station and working on an interface between the distributor (ENEDIS) and Rte. The signal generator kicked in and sounded like a fog horn, made me jump a meter. You could hear the transformer hum louder and all the ventilation kicked in. Basically every one started heating water.
I helped develop the turtle power line carrier system. It was a PLC system that as the record for the longest distance sent over a power line. At one point there was a meter in the outback of Australia sending meter readings to a transmission substation 200 miles away.
That is cool. Does that mean that nothing else between those 2 points could send a signal at the same time? Seems like that would be an issue if you have local signals being sent between devices and they are disturbed by a signal that needs to be sent a long distance. Or is it a sub net that ends at the substation and the long distance signal is sent on the big transmission lines?
@@excitedbox5705 It used ultra narrow bandwidth transmissions so that 1000's of meters could send at the same time. The signal was current changes so it only sent the signal towards the power source. It was limited to the size of the substation powering it so in this case it was just that the meter was way out in the desert via a 1 wire run. The company was later bought out by L&G and they discontinued the product.
@@LaserFur That sounds awesome. Was it via SWER? I like the idea that a bunch of washing machines, dishwashers and dryers could be queued up ahead of time, then have that info sent back to the local lines company who then calculate the power load and could then respond telling individual groups of appliances to start up at certain times. I think there will come a time when these sorts of systems will be needed for more efficient electric car charging.
@@hbaykiwi yes Single wire earth return. I doubt the technology we used could be used for more than daily meter reads. It transmitted one bit of data every 33 minutes. so a whole packet of data took all day.
Here in the Czech republic (and also years ago in the former Czechoslovakia) it's called HDO, the czech abbreviation for Mass Remote Control. It is used not only to switch on or off the water heaters and other heat accumulation devices, but also to command the energy meters to switch between high and low tariff, also in places where the heaters are independent of it. As a teenager I added a LED indicator next to the washing machine for my mom let she know the right time to start the washing.
In The Netherlands we still have a control signal thing. It's called ToonFrequent (Tone Frequency) This system injects 492 Hz on the 50 Hz in the grid at serval intervals and controls the day/night tariff, public lights, highway lights, de-icing (only at very low temperatures), low/high tide (very important, because, yeah, Netherlands...), and some more stuff i haven't figured out yet. The old TF-receivers are well engineered electromechanical devices, with a synchonous motor and gear system and a discriminator (to filter the signal and sending a pulse to the motor). If you are interested, i can send you some of those devices.
Repair that thing. Would be interesting. Our electricity meter switches to low rates at 23:00 and back to high rates at 7:00. Maybe that's the time I should be probing the mains?
Wow what a blast from the past back years ago I worked for Seqeb which became Energex and I used to use one of those regularly in the late 90s. They were a key tool and that unit would have been set up to put out just above a 2 volt signal which was used to test the relays. We also used to use a pen recorder to measure to voltage levels of the ripple if a relay was testing fine but not switching. Thanks for bringing back some good memories.
I was working on this for some time, as a "pirate" project. But I've never managed to inject recorded signal back to grid to change the electricity counter to the lower payment tariff.
Be careful, if it decided to work you could overload the grid if the signals got out to your neighbours and further. I can imagine you'd be in all sorts of trouble if that happened and you got caught.
@@johncoops6897 : If you're using a smart meter then the signal will be using the same data signal as the general check-in and switch-control, so if you filter it out you'll filter everything else out too, causing the company to send out a lineman on suspicion of a fallen wire. If the lineman doesn't see a problem then they'll have to disconnect you anyways, because _that_ just indicates that the problem is _hidden,_ possibly inside a building. When they then swap meters to try debugging they'll notice that _that_ one _also_ doesn't work, causing them to tell you that you have to get the service drop fixed before they can restore power.
Here in Finland that is called "yösähkö" (night electricity). Electricity is cheaper at night time and firm can control waterheaters and such high loads. I do not know how that system works, but i do know there is more than just one control possibility. Also that system is used to load balancing. All waterheaters do not start heating water at 22:00 when "yösähkö" starts, but they start heating randomly between 22:00 and 1:00.
This method of remote switching of consumer devices by power companies has been around for a very long time. Modern Zellweger relays are all electronic, but back in earlier times, the actual relay coil was tuned for resonance at the frequency of the ripple. It would ignore the 50Hz mains frequency and react to the ripple when it was present.
253v is the upper limit for our region in nsw (see endeavour energy network power quality limits & levels page 8 for more info). Lower limit is 216v rms. Select 1050Hz which is common for prospect county council area ripple control. Preferred voltage limits are 225-244v rms.
I used to work in a steel mill in Watervliet, NY that had three carbon arc furnaces for melting scrap steel. In the control room for each furnace there was a set of colored lamps, red, yellow, and green. In the summer, if the yellow or red lamp came on, the operator was to turn down the furnace to some specific power level. In the rest of the plant there was a siren that when it went off, we had 30 minutes to finish a process and then shut down the machinery. I believe we were given favorable electric rates and in turn, were allowed to be used for load shedding. I wonder if a similar method was used to send commands to our plant.
In France we have a system called Pulsadis and uses a 175Hz carrier. Since a few years ago we now have VERY controversial "Linky" smart power meters which communicate over powerline carrier. They use a standard called G3PLC and uses 36 OFDM carriers between 36kHz and 90kHz
I made a simple window AC thermostat with an Arduino and wanted it to turn on at a zero-switching point of AC. Instead of running a wire to mains, I just hung a few inches of wire off an ADC input and took a look at the waveform. Pretty strong 60 Hz AC pickup. I added some zero-crossing code and a settable delay from when it found a crossing.
In North America: I think my power company has a device to connect inline with my air conditioner to control power usage at peak times. I thought it was some kind of wireless device, but I wonder if it's PLC? I actually don't have one anymore to research 🙁
Looks like the unit was originally equipped with only shielded banana jacks for the Mains connection. The power cord looks to be hacked into the unit. Someone drilled out the Neutral Jack.
I feel like this concept will be a good starting point for a research project I am pursuing this semester at university! Thanks Dave, I can always count on you to bring quality content
I'd love to see some decoded messages, more info on the protocols and ofcourse a repair!! I have been looking into this stuff some months ago, for the 180 hz (enermet receiver) system in my area (belgium), but information is sparse. It's called CAB (centrale afstandsbediening=central remote-control) in Flanders and Toonfrequent in the Netherlands www.toonfrequent.nl/
Yep I’ve got an old one of those on my water heater circuit, never bothered to rip it out because the 240v line would be too short. Maine, USA. Think it was a voluntary thing they did back in the 80’s here.
Here one of the local power companies used a 2-tone power line carrier system years ago. They've since gone to a system that uses digital signals. I actually built an MC68705 into the 2-tone generator that was only designed for manual operation. At the time the microprocessor allowed an Apple III to send tones back in the 80's. Later it was connected to an IBM PC-AT.
Absolutely fascinating I have suspected for years that there was some kind of noise(and not 60hz mains frequency)in any mains powered receiver or high gain DIY amplifier but when powering said equipment from a big generator(sine wave of course) the internment interference was always gone. Sometimes there was some interference from the generator but it was from changing current load
Kiwi here. A month or two ago I was messing about with trying to receive radio by using the mains as an antenna, and a big filter to cut out the 50Hz, and I kept getting erroneous non-repeating signals. Could have been zellweger, or maybe it was one of those power-line-communications doorbells. Never captured them with my timebase on right to analyse them.
Here in Germany i had that during the summer when my fan was running all the time (and it was really annoying in the night). I used a stepdown transformer / variac to throttle a large 130W fan and it was a beeping on a fixed tone for like 3 to 1 seconds over like a minute in the evening hours.
I can remember when i was a kid in the late seventies i could hear these signals through my audio input of my audio amplifier when i touched the input wires. You would hear the normal 50 hz humming and in the background you could hear this intermitting slightly higher humming noise.
I have not seen it used in the US, However, I have used networking based on mains, where i have 2 tranceivers each connected at 2 ends of a building, so long as they are connected to the same leg of the fuse box you can connect Ethernet cables and transmit data through the mains. It was a solution before wifi was common.
I think BPL "Broadcasting over Power Lines" is the predominate system used in the Untied States, It uses HF frequencies and supposedly skips over the HAM bands, and sometimes it does. It is also injected locally. Ron W4BIN
The ripple control receiver (like a radio receiver) has a resonant circuit at the channel frequency. Most modern meters contain one. This voltage is used to drive a relay change !
I live in Philly and there's only one rate no matter the time of day. I guess they don't have problems with excess demand. It's been like that everywhere else I've lived too, but that's only been the mid-Atlantic region. In my current apartment though, the heat, hot water, and even the A/C run on gas (central to the building).
USA utility companies use VLF frequencies (carrier frequencies) this RF at low frequencies travels along power lines for long distances. I believe the system is on its way out however with our push to newer technologies called “smart grid” but initially the utility companies use this for switching transformers and circuit breakers from at remote locations. Great news! We now have the 2200M band, subject to sharing with utility companies who may not have to share the band with nearby hams. Most experimenters use short, inefficient antennas with very large loading coils. Propagation in this RF region is by surface wave, using vertically polarized antennas. (from ARRL website)
Common in New Zealand, most households have electric hot water systems which are controlled from a ripple control switch for load shedding. Most of the ripple control system is Zellweger brand. The type you showed in the video. Enermet is Landis&Gyr.
Enermet are another player Dave, however Zellwieger are also huge. I believe they were heavily involved very early in the introduction of ripple control. We use the acronym AFLC which stands for Audible Frequency Load Control.
In Hungary we had a similar kind of "audio frequency" ripple control from the mid 70s. It wasn't implemented everywhere. As a child in the end of the 80s I still remember we had a clock type control unit. This was up until the end of the 90s. That's when we had our first neutral line injected control signal. I remember it didn't switched on long enough to heat up like 180liters of water for a family with two kids. Nowadays our oldest and tallest long wave radio tower controls RF switching recievers. It's called Lakihegy Tower. It has a tuneable height of 284-314m. A Blaw-Knox type thingie (the cigar shaped one). E.on broadcasts a DCF or WWV like almost atomic clock precision time signal from it, and of course as I recall a properitary Versacom protocol control signal. Using this I think they even switch at non-regular intervals. The law says they have to add up like 8 hours per day. The interesting technique in the receiver is that it can rotate it's LW ferrite antenna jobbie to best reception.I think we had a PROLAN RRCR110 type unit. Right now my parents have central and I have gas heating, so I can't give up-to-date info on this. If I ever get my hands on a retired unit I'll send it right to you so you can say we're in like Flinn again, but first I'll take it apart too! :)
Same here in NZ, the local power company has to provide no more than 8 hours of "off" time per day for hot water heating. So its usually broken up into several blocks of peaks with the biggest off time being in the evening so your hot water doesnt start heating again until later at night during the off-peak
Zellweger are known for producing our ripple control receivers that turn our hot water on and off and our street lights etc. The signal is sent on the half hour or the hour. The signal is coded in Decabit. The close to 1 khz signal can be heard in any active motor windings at 10 p.m. keep an ear out..! (Sounds like a long slow morse)
For those of you interested, In Straya the originating ripple signal is injected by the local zone substation via high-voltage equipment. This then passes via the high voltage network to the neighbourhood transformers. Then into your LV switchboard!
nice, i recently picked up a bunch of those ripple meters from the scrap yard, now all i need is this device you are showing in the video, the ripple meters are all stamped 317hz and have 3 different control codes on them, where do i get one of these injectors? haha
I live in Zurich, Switzerland, so it is unlikly to have high loads at the home, as most places get hot water from the city central heating or from gas heaters, but I will run some tests around the time the night tarrif starts, and see what I can capture on the scope. Zellweger appear to be a Swiss company, and Landis and Gyr is also Swiss company, they power meter are very popular in Switzerland, they are also a leader in electric grid automation and metering and control systems. So I wouldn't be surprised to catch some signals around.
You should get that thing working and give it a go. I'm not sure how you'd know whether you're switching your neighbors appliances on and off, perhaps someone will track you down an let you know. One possible way for utilities to even out demand is to play with voltage. Lower supplied voltage during high-demand times and crank up the voltage during low demand times. I've never monitored voltage over the day but wouldn't be surprised if they do it.
Hi Dave, NSW and QLD were using ripple control up until the introduction of “stupid meters” to control the time of use loads like heat banks, water heaters, the receivers were adjustable for frequency and number of pulses, they could control groups of consumers to control network loading. It was a shit of a system, since you live in Sydney, I am sure you will remember the beep, beep beeeep, crushing thru every electrical item in your house every week night at around 11PM. Absolute crunt of a thing.
Handy box when your kids use up all the hotwater in the evening :) Note there is Controlled Load 1 (CL1) and CL2 - CL1 I think is the night time one but CL2 can go on and off during the day and will vary I believe with network load. Cool tutorial video might be to design a filter to detect these so you can plot the on and off times on a Raspberry Pi or something.
I'd be interested in a follow video that suggests how to filter out the injected ripple. It very noticeable in ceiling fans (especially in the quiet of night), fluro globes, LED globes, and cooktop induction heating elements.
I used a lot of those *exact* Motorola 68705 chips back in the day. I still have the programmer. Back then, it was the only real game in town. I still have a bunch of them.
Do you happen to still have this working and be willing to part with it? I have been working for a long time to try and make one of these systems. That would be a very useful device to have because it encodes the DECABIT protocol that I need to test with. I already have been able to inject signals directly into mains on a smaller scale but it uses a large motor-generator set that I made. the protocol I am using right now is K22 as listed on the device but I would like to switch to DECABIT soon. I tried to make one with an arduino but the sheer amount of variables isn't fun to deal with. Thanks for showing this unit, its very cool to see the original Zellweger units around. EDIT: Some info on the protocols used in case anyone is interested, the 3-minute transmission time is only for K22 and hybrid systems, k22 used older mechanical receivers and it took 7.5 seconds per channel to transmit the code. They had to transmit all 22 channels filling up that approximate 3 minute time in order to keep all the other receivers in their correct modes. the newer decabit protocol can encode a command in 6.6 seconds. Dave is correct in thinking that the absence of ripple is a 0 and presence is 1, the DECABIT sequence always starts with a start bit which is 1 and then 10 data bits. 5 of the data bits must be 1, and 5 0 to get a total possible 126 combinations. the on telegram (+ on the last digit of the selector) is inverted to make the off telegram. If you want more info, I have too much to tell.
Decabit is 5 bits on / 5 bits off plus start bit. Always total of 5 on and 5 off so there's about 126 valid codes out of 10 bits. The high numbers on the thumb wheels are invalid Decabit codes hence the error light. I actually have a use for one of these developing a decoder for Decabit. Any chance you'd want to off load it?
Really easy: Do you know mains meter tariff switching? That‘s been done with those back in the days... or central street light switching, etc... have a look at rodalco ... he did a very good video on ripple injection
I suspect they send those ripple encodings around midnight. I remember being able to see slight flicker on incandescent lights dimmed down. Might be wrong though :)
Erm, I'm guessing the blue bodge wires were to some external test equipment and used during troubleshooting. They probably gave up on the unit and didn't bother to remove them after.
I discovered Mains Ripple Injection after moving to Queensland and my ceiling fans kept making a a strange buzzing noise for a few minutes or so at the same times each day.
Here in Greece it´s called "night current" or "night power", it´s injected to the meter to slow it down I presume when it applies. Have heard stories of people trying to cheat it, but I think even during the day the utility company sends the "daytime" signal periodically so it´s not all that easy.
In the UK it is called economy 7, because 7 hours cheap rate. My mum used to have it when I was a lad. I don't know how they trigger it, I figured just timer in the box? There was an led on the meter that lit when active... we had a gas combi boiler so... why mum?
I wonder whether you could influence your electricity bill by feeding the output of the test device into your local mains outlet. E.g. sending the right signal might switch the electricity meter to "off-peak mode".
It looks like the decabit example shows a 10-bit code (a number between 0-1023). Deca means 10, so there you go. A decade is 10 years. Hecto means 100 and, of course, kilo means 1000. In Norway they measure fish volume en gros (in bulk) by the HectoLiter (100 liters). I even looked it up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
In New Zealand we no have never controlled hot water like that. It only gets turned off a during the morning and evening to control network load when people start cooking at night and in the morning.
Can anyone explain to me how the ripple on the mains side is generated? Is the secondary side of the signal transformer just shorted with the MOSFETs at the modulation frequency?
This is the same system that big brother uses to turn off / adjust the temperature of air conditiong systems ie DRED. It uses the same principle ie data modulated using the power system as a carrier. I'm surprised that we have not yet seen commercial in-line band pass filters to filter the incoming mains and remove big brothers ability to control our aircons. Of course most people don't even know its happening so there is that.
@@deadgaming20 if you're American you may know him as Uncle Sam I believe? ;) Which raises the question how is your uncle also your brother? Perhaps it's best we don't think about it?
@@deadgaming20 But yeah in all honesty its the power companies who decide to turn off or limit the power output of your aircon and not specifically the government.
In the Netherlands a similar system is or was in use. It is used for switching street lights and for switching the energy meter to a lower night rate. Consumers with such a system installed in their energy meter pay a small fee but get the lower night rate.
It is still in use! Not for long though... It's called Toonfrequent (TF) or centrale afstands bediening (CAB). It's being phased out for consumers and business, but I don't know if the street light signal is getting phased out as well. I certainly hope so, it seems to interfere with some LED dimmers which makes them flicker about every half hour. (20:00, 20:30 etc)
So where I live, Florida Power & Light has what they call their "On-Demand" system where they'll install PLC boxes in front of your water heater, aircon, heat and pool pump. In exchange for a (paltry) credit on your bill, they reserve the right to cut power to those devices for up to 3.5 hours a day to shed load in peak demand times. They can get pretty damn aggressive with it in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane to keep load low on substations and capacity available for critical loads but if I'm honest they really only seem to load-shed is between 3-6PM during the week which can be a bit of an annoyance if you're working from home if they decide to take away your aircon. And they also seem to fail open when they fail, so you've gotta open them up bridge the terminals out and then wait for the power company to rock up to replace the silly buggers and boy do they kick up a fuss when they've found out you did that.
I had just posted a reply about that, they fail open on the relay, its a pain. Around where i live up here in the Midwest they aren't that common anymore, used to see them in every house, but now they don't do it anymore. The old ones were abandoned and as they fail people rip them out or just leave them as a junction box and bypass the wiring inside. Surprised they still use them in Florida, but makes sense. Around here all the small power co-ops took over and as the towns went off the main line providers and became their own co-ops those boxes were just abandoned. My last house had one in it, i tore it out when it failed and the hot water heater didn't work one day. The house i live in now didn't have one and never seems to have or someone else removed it and replaced the wiring to the water heater most likely, thats how most of them disappeared over the years.
That ripple injection is a PAIN in the arse when you are trying to record a high-gain valve amp on the overdrive channel at home! Nothing worse than finding out that your perfect take is loaded with bzzzzzzzzzzzt.................bzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.... hahah
Is zellweger still around? Well yes and no. They've been bought by Uster Technologies, which i live very near to (< 1km, the old Zellweger area is being transformed into housings) and they specialize in yarn quality measurements. Also funnily enough, Uster Technologies is the rival company of the company I work for. I'm also getting a suspicion that Zellweger Australia may not be the same zellweger from switzerland
Interesting i never knew how off peak worked and how the meter knew to switch it on. One place i lived at would switch at the wrong time. Meter was inside and you could hear the relay. Didn't try to find out why, didn't care as the times the HWS was on was ok.
Y'all aussies with out a new integrated digital meter will have 2 analog or digital meters and a 3rd rectangle thing with a green switch inside it behind the transparent cover. That green switch is what actually turns on and off from this signal, if you run out of hot water and want to be a cheeky bugger you can break the top seal and flip it on. Although I'm pretty sure if the grid is struggling they just keep sending that ripple to get all the older switches that are a bit sticky. I flip them on to test hot water or pool pumps if it's in peak times, usually they just stay on but some days they constantly flip off every time I flip it on. You will also have to be sneaky and make the seal look like you haven't tampered with it, or get a sparky to put in a reseal form, or in most cases I just leave it and the meter reader dude reseals it, being that that top seal doesn't allow you to alter any wiring so there isn't really any foul play that you can do
This Mains Ripple Injection (a DELIBERATE addition of junk to the power-line--what a country!) is the reason that high-frequency bypassing (low-value cap to handle higher frequencies) should be added to ALL DC power supply outputs! See Dave's excellent video on *bypass capacitors*: ruclips.net/video/BcJ6UdDx1vg/видео.html
In the US , very rural isolated upstate NY state , REA electric utility , as a teenager playing with /repairing old cheap stereo equipment alot , late 70's or early 80's timeframe . I would often have audio amps on but idle (quiet, no music), sometime with headphones on , I would remember hearing a "faint " high pitched tone , always seemed to be near (a few minutes before) the top of the hour as I remember . I remember only a single tone , duration maybe 10-30 seconds ?? , Don't know the exact audio freq, maybe several Khz ?? quite high. Otherwise the amp would be perfectly quiet , the rest of the time. I remember I could always count on that high pitched faint tone at the same time each hour after hour. Over the recent years , I have occasionally searched what this might have been.with no luck. I thought possibly it was on the power lines , some kind of time signalling tone because alway remember it being a few minute before top of the hour. Or some other kind of power company signalling. Any Ideas on what this might have been ??
I've seen lots of the relays in domestic DB boards in South Africa but have never seen it actually switch something so I don't know whether the system is still in use over here.
![Yeat & Quavo - 5BRAZY [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4XxnTAwyxus/mqdefault.jpg)
This has been used in Germany for decades, mainly for load balancing and switching on/off night storage heating systems ("Nachtspeicheröfen"), in conjunction with two-tariff electricity meters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they did lots of experimentation with this technique, like even alarming the fire department, or remotely switching off the mains for customers that didn’t pay. As far as I know, they used a lot of different protocols (Decabit was one of them), the local electricity board decided which was used. I believe this is still now used to limit power injection from third parties into the network, i.e. from solar or wind parks (everything that could inject more than 30 kW).
The German name for this is "Rundsteuertechnik", and it uses frequencies between 167Hz and 2kHz, with an amplitude of 1-8% of the nominal mains voltage (limited to max. 9%).
The Zellweger company (now part of the Swiss Ascom holding) developed the Decabit protocol in the 1960s. It has a start pulse "SI" plus 10 (thus "deca") pulses of 600ms each, so each command is 6.6s in length. Pulses are always followed by a pause, so a 5-of-10 combinations are possible. Now for n=10, m=5, n! / ((n - m)! * m!) = 252. Since commands are always "double commands" (for on/off, signified by a "+" or "-"), effectively 126 double-commands can be sent using Decabit. This is the reason why your device flashed "error" for some codes. Codes 0..126 should be valid for Decabit, "+" for "on" and "-" for "off".
Let’s take the Decabit command "011+", which would be "11010101010" (SI+1.I+2.I .. +10.I). The corresponding "off" command "011-" should be "10101010101", if I remember correctly. It has the pulses inverted, only I can’t quite remember if SI and the pause pulses had to be inverted, too. I _seem_ to remember SI stayed a "1" but all 10 pulses had to be inverted.
Interesting find!
How lucky
It's now also used for Photovoltaik Systems greater than 30kWp. The can can regulate the produced power in 100/60/30/0% steps to stabilizer the grid or in "emergency" situations. At certain sizes (Don' quote me at the exact number) you are also required to have a UPS so the system stays active in case of a complete blackout. This is because you can't have (in the extreme case) for example having a 2+ MWp plant starting injecting full power when you have starting up the grid again.
*Specialization intensifies*
And also for decades this signal is coupled in analog amplifiers. Very annoying... I might've cassette recordings from decades ago with this signal recorded.
Yes i remember these heating devices. My parents home still has them.
I think those wires were left over from some troubleshooting session that was interrupted. The wires probably went to a bench power supply or multimeter. I guess they intended to come back to it, later so they left the wires in.
Possible.
For mains nipple injection testing.
In my country Slovenia, my house had a I guess a similar type of injector, right next to the power meter, and apparantly it injected the switchover signal to the entire street. Of course since It was in our house and my grandfather was a electritian, he wired up a switch to the boiler and to the injector, where when you turned on the boiler, it would switch over to the cheaper electricity. It worked flawlessly until someone from the street complained that they were paying too little (how stupid can you be to complain about that) and the electric company showed up, saw what was going on and yeah you can imagine what followed. Anyway that happened some 20-30 years ago, well before I was born.
LOL! This is why we can't have nice things.
Who the hell complains that they're *not paying enough!?* I'd be furious with that guy lol
A little while ago in Plekhanovo, a gypsy village in the Tulskij oblast the entire village was stealing gas and electricity and they weren't paying their bills. So the power company came with riot police, cut their gas and power. And then on top of everything came court bailiffs and confiscated their property. Flat screen TVs, jewelry etc. The gypsies of course acted out and were arrested.
Why is there a cheap and an expensive electricity?
@@moclan582 to encourage usage at off peak hours to level load the grid and minimize peaks.
That doesn't make sense. Unless he was triggering the injector during the day, then everybody's boiler would turn on and be charged at the higher tariff.
For future reference guys, don't list what DIP switches to turn on like this 1:13. Show the individual switches like 00001010 or even - - - - 1 - 1 -. It is so much quicker and easier and you can see *patterns* easily.
In Britain it is done by a signal sent over the BBC R4 LW network on 192kHz, this frequency being able to be picked up in most of the UK from it's 3 main transmitters at Droitwich (main), Burghead and Westerglen (I would have thought that the two aforementioned Scottish relays would relay this information as well). There are/were? also a few small relays as well.
The device connected to the meter is a radio teleswitch, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
This service will run until the R4 LW transmitter at Droitwich uses up it's last spare transmitting valve as the BBC won't either have new valves made or the transmitters replaced.
In Britain the only real users of this system are people who have to use electric night storage heaters for one reason or another, as even with the off-peak rate gas is still cheaper.
Interesting, thanks.
Interesting, thanks
Absolutely correct, except for one small detail. It's 198kHz.
I don’t know how much this is actually used nowadays. I’m on an Economy 7 tariff (7 being the number of off peak hours) and ours just switches to off peak according to a time, no teleswitch. It’s consistently 00:36 - 07:36.
dglcomputers
I always wondered if they still used a similar system here in the Old Dart, but according to your post, apparently not. ;)
(I'd noticed the lights often dimmed at peak times like 9pm, but it seemed more like an intentional dimming time of around half a second, rather than the switchover for nighttime use. Or maybe one of our neighbours is powering up a Cray. lol)
hackaday.com/2016/12/06/decabit-or-the-conspiracy-theory-that-wasnt/
Interesting system / device / vid / reply.
Rodalco2007 has a couple of videos showing the full size version of this device working.
ruclips.net/video/EjtEPXQkHeM/видео.html
First
Wikipedia link follows later in comment.
Second.
I thought someone would probably mention him.
And go to the Wikipedia page as far as you might recognize the name associated with who took the pictures.
I don't know if it's a coincidence, but I kind of doubt it.
The channel name is very close to the persons named head took it taking the pictures.
Also for anyone interested here is a link to the Wikipedia article that is spoken about in this video.
Third.
I Indian see on one of the Eevee ball. Channels? Videos about it was one of the videos on his solar install
Dave Jones that is.
And they were talking about the old zillweger relay.
And also it was one of the ones that had the radioactivity issue.
By the way, it's not just radium.
It's also trinium as well.
I just got done reading the Wikipedia article, by the way.
Had it bookmarked from before.
When I first heard about the residual your system on the other channel you mentioned.
Here's the Wikipedia link.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak?wprov=sfla1
I remember. Here in the United States.
Where my parents used to live their first house they owned.
Two things. It was kind of similar except different.
A lot of houses at least at that time down there had to meter sockets.
Even though that were single residence.
The Normal meter was in one.
Wish served everything except one purpose.
The second meter.
Was connected to the electric hot water heater.
There was a separate safety switch. That had 2 30 amp Edison plug fuses in it for the 220 volts ac 60 hertz power for the water heater.
Also Is that meter had a timer built-in to the Fishbowl.
AKA glass meter housing.
It was really long compared 2 the standard meter..
It had a timer. With strippers that were set internally That could not be adjusted.
Precept when Demeter was put together.
But since this was an AC synchronous motor timer.
There was originally a cover. That would foot down over the whole to set the time.
But the outer part was there, but evidently that had broken off years before We moved in.
No evidence of tampering or either.
Also I remember as well.
The water meters were in the basements. Of the houses.
And other buildings.
Although in some places they were in manholes.
But you would have this little black box on the side of your house.
It had what looked like a trident logo on it.
And there's a wire that ran from that inside.
And that connects to the water meter.
The older ones have seven wires.
And I newer ones had either three or four wires can't remember which.
How do I know this?
I was always interested in mechanical stuff utilities. I was really into stuff like that. And I'm also a maker. What it be in La Puente near even.
But with how I found out I actually asked what the meter readers once about the system.
She explained the whole thing to me pretty cool.
By the way, people that knew me that worked in various places or companies and found out those ended stuff and could use sings to salvage. Oh, yeah.
Also like with the water heater off off-peak train times at least in Wisconsin.
Later on, we had an off-peak electric meter.
Is that would just charge two different rates at different times.
It was a more modern meter.
Other than that, I don't remember what it look like.
Also, I remember in Tennessee.
It was not a smart meter, but it just had a digital display.
By the way, this was well over 20 years ago.
also in Tennessee where my grandparents lived.
On the farm.
The electric hot water heater for the house.
however, not in the dairy barn.
at the breaker panel.
Had this gray box attached to it.
Big rectangular thing.
That was an off-peak load switch for the water heater.
Much later on it had been disconnected and removed.
Also, I do believe those. A gray units there about the same size as a u.s. electric meter.
Often seen sometimes on power poles.
But for what purpose?
I never could quite figure out for what?
Are next to central air units in some places.
Are the same sort of thing.
I remember one time seeing something like that in a surplus catalog.
I do know I do know there's some sort of load control.
Anybody got any info on these? I'm not going to find what they are anywhere.
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 are you insane or otherwise mentally damaged? This comment reads like the ramblings of the insane!!
Next one : mains botox injection, to get rid of ripples.
For some reason I read nipples and wondered why you would want to get rid of those.
Next one : mains silicone injection, to supplement the nipples
The shenanigans that can be had with such a device.
Back in the 80's, the power lines in my old neighborhood made a buzzy sound around top of each hour at night. I think ballasts in street lights may have resonated with some kind of signal imposed on the mains. I thought I might hear something related to that someday...THANX !
I remember when it used to be a thing here in the US. Power companies used to push it as demand switching and generally things like your electric tank style hot water heater would be put on a box with a relay in it, or some cases they used it to control the power to the outside unit for central air conditioning, etc. Then if there was a high demand event, like a super hot day and everyone is cranking the AC they could issue a command to shut off demand appliances to help the grid from overload. I don't see these anymore or hear it mentioned at all. The power companies used to do it here as an incentive, if you let them put it on your appliances they would give you a reduced cost or annual kickback. The bad thing i do remember is when they discontinued the program where i live, just about everyone had it on their hot water heater because there was a large push to save money by allowing it back in the day. It was a small box next to the breaker panel with three LED's in a small window on the front door, there was a green for operating, a green for appliance power on, and a red for appliance power off. What happened when they abandoned the system was they issued one final command to tell all the demand units to turn ON and stay on. So every one of these boxes were defaulted to just sitting there powering a relay inside that was turned on 24/7. So they were just wasting power, albeit a small amount, to run the board inside and keep that relay on all the time. The problem was they wired them so the appliance was on the NO terminal, so they had to be commanded to switch the relay ON or in the case of a power outage when the box reset it would turn the relay back on, i remember the box even had a label on it that said if the appliance wouldn't come on and there was not a demand event or if the appliance was needed during a demand event to power cycle the box, and it would default the relay back to on. The problem was after years of sitting idle the relay's started failing and dropping out and everyone was coming home to either no hot water or no AC at some point. Countless numbers of these were removed by local electricians as the local power municipality refused to take responsibility for they abandoned installs, and since people didn't want to pay an electrician most would open them up find the wires going to the hot water heater or whatever appliance and remove the two line wires from the relay and connect them with a wire nut and leave the box in place or take the output wire and put it on the input wire screw terminal to connect them leaving the box still powered and still consuming power via its transformer on the PCB inside, until eventually the units completely failed and died or in some cases even caught fire. Most people however were smart enough to remove both the line wires completely from the relay and leave the wire to the power supply on the PCB out of the wire nut, it had two wires on the supply side, the one from the breaker supplying the appliance one to a short jumper that went to the PCB to power it and people though it just needed to be there but some would remove power to the box and just leave it there as a junction box for the water heater for eternity! I have replaced water heaters where the box was still there, some even still powered with their LED's lit 20+ years since they were last in use. Most have been removed or just bypassed and left to collect dust these days, but they are a relic you still find in some basements near the breaker panel or water heater.
Good info.. thankyou
Still in use in NZ - you get a discount on your monthly power bill if you have your hot water "controlled" and certified.
Big power consumers can also negotiate discounts by connecting things like water pumps etc using ripple control where the local power board can switch on and off heavy users.
With many different codes, covering different industries they have options about who to prioritise. Eg. Crop irrigation might be a low priority so they might turn that off first and irrigators use a special code specific for them.
Residential water boilers in my city have four codes and the electrician is told to choose a random one of the four codes when programming them so the power board can switch on/off boilers in random steps to ease the load so it doesnt all come on at once.
Street lamps use another couple of codes - high priority and low priority so they can switch off some after midnight though with the change to LEDs they save so much power that they just have a light sensor on each one and they dont need to shed the load anymore.
Air conditioning is only becoming common in the last 10 years here so they havent really done much with them though i like the idea that freezers and fridges could be designed with water compartments that freeze during the night to ease the load during the day similar to night store heaters but cooling your fridge instead of heating.
Same with washing machines etc. You should be able to set your washing machine to or dryer to start their cycle when they recieve the next off-peak commence code.
Here in Brisbane I can hear the signal through the ceiling fan at night. It is sent at around 20min intervals and lasts for 15 sec.
In France this is still used, although now it's the meter which receives the signal and activates a relay and switches the tarif. Before the newer meters came in you had a little box on the fuse board that connected to a relay controlling the hot water tank. I think it's in the 190 Hz range superimposed over 50 Hz. They also have other frequencies that can, depending on the contract, vary multiple tarifs or activate relays for load control.
I remember once when I was in a Rte (French transmission operator) sub station and working on an interface between the distributor (ENEDIS) and Rte. The signal generator kicked in and sounded like a fog horn, made me jump a meter. You could hear the transformer hum louder and all the ventilation kicked in. Basically every one started heating water.
I helped develop the turtle power line carrier system. It was a PLC system that as the record for the longest distance sent over a power line. At one point there was a meter in the outback of Australia sending meter readings to a transmission substation 200 miles away.
That is cool. Does that mean that nothing else between those 2 points could send a signal at the same time? Seems like that would be an issue if you have local signals being sent between devices and they are disturbed by a signal that needs to be sent a long distance. Or is it a sub net that ends at the substation and the long distance signal is sent on the big transmission lines?
@@excitedbox5705 It used ultra narrow bandwidth transmissions so that 1000's of meters could send at the same time. The signal was current changes so it only sent the signal towards the power source. It was limited to the size of the substation powering it so in this case it was just that the meter was way out in the desert via a 1 wire run. The company was later bought out by L&G and they discontinued the product.
@@LaserFur That sounds awesome. Was it via SWER? I like the idea that a bunch of washing machines, dishwashers and dryers could be queued up ahead of time, then have that info sent back to the local lines company who then calculate the power load and could then respond telling individual groups of appliances to start up at certain times.
I think there will come a time when these sorts of systems will be needed for more efficient electric car charging.
@@hbaykiwi yes Single wire earth return. I doubt the technology we used could be used for more than daily meter reads. It transmitted one bit of data every 33 minutes. so a whole packet of data took all day.
When street lights rapidly turns on and off during the day, then You know: Dave founds something in the dumpster :D
Here in the Czech republic (and also years ago in the former Czechoslovakia) it's called HDO, the czech abbreviation for Mass Remote Control. It is used not only to switch on or off the water heaters and other heat accumulation devices, but also to command the energy meters to switch between high and low tariff, also in places where the heaters are independent of it. As a teenager I added a LED indicator next to the washing machine for my mom let she know the right time to start the washing.
Are you telling me this sucker's nuclear?
No... it's electrical but I need the 1.21 Decabits to get the water heater started.
In The Netherlands we still have a control signal thing. It's called ToonFrequent (Tone Frequency) This system injects 492 Hz on the 50 Hz in the grid at serval intervals and controls the day/night tariff, public lights, highway lights, de-icing (only at very low temperatures), low/high tide (very important, because, yeah, Netherlands...), and some more stuff i haven't figured out yet. The old TF-receivers are well engineered electromechanical devices, with a synchonous motor and gear system and a discriminator (to filter the signal and sending a pulse to the motor). If you are interested, i can send you some of those devices.
I'd be really keen to see a teardown to see how some of the analog ripple control recievers worked before transistors / microchips.
Repair that thing. Would be interesting. Our electricity meter switches to low rates at 23:00 and back to high rates at 7:00. Maybe that's the time I should be probing the mains?
I guess they may stagger the timing to prevent fluctuation
I imagine they would have been proud of that in Nazi germany?
@@gus6rocks Dude, what?
Who knew that Renée had an electronics company in addition to her acting career?
Her father was an engineer.
I scrolled for this comment in specific.
Wow what a blast from the past back years ago I worked for Seqeb which became Energex and I used to use one of those regularly in the late 90s. They were a key tool and that unit would have been set up to put out just above a 2 volt signal which was used to test the relays. We also used to use a pen recorder to measure to voltage levels of the ripple if a relay was testing fine but not switching. Thanks for bringing back some good memories.
I was working on this for some time, as a "pirate" project. But I've never managed to inject recorded signal back to grid to change the electricity counter to the lower payment tariff.
Be careful, if it decided to work you could overload the grid if the signals got out to your neighbours and further. I can imagine you'd be in all sorts of trouble if that happened and you got caught.
Probably missing the uberlong bodgewire.
@@threeMetreJim - obviously you'd run such a bodge behind a ripple frequency filter (to prevent backfeed to the grid).
@@johncoops6897 : If you're using a smart meter then the signal will be using the same data signal as the general check-in and switch-control, so if you filter it out you'll filter everything else out too, causing the company to send out a lineman on suspicion of a fallen wire. If the lineman doesn't see a problem then they'll have to disconnect you anyways, because _that_ just indicates that the problem is _hidden,_ possibly inside a building. When they then swap meters to try debugging they'll notice that _that_ one _also_ doesn't work, causing them to tell you that you have to get the service drop fixed before they can restore power.
@@absalomdraconis - well, OK. But this discussion ISN'T ABOUT smart meters. It's about ripple control, so let's stay on track huh?
Here in Finland that is called "yösähkö" (night electricity). Electricity is cheaper at night time and firm can control waterheaters and such high loads. I do not know how that system works, but i do know there is more than just one control possibility. Also that system is used to load balancing. All waterheaters do not start heating water at 22:00 when "yösähkö" starts, but they start heating randomly between 22:00 and 1:00.
Enermet was manufacturing electricity meters in Finland. It was merged to Landis+Gyr at 2008
This method of remote switching of consumer devices by power companies has been around for a very long time. Modern Zellweger relays are all electronic, but back in earlier times, the actual relay coil was tuned for resonance at the frequency of the ripple. It would ignore the 50Hz mains frequency and react to the ripple when it was present.
253v is the upper limit for our region in nsw (see endeavour energy network power quality limits & levels page 8 for more info). Lower limit is 216v rms. Select 1050Hz which is common for prospect county council area ripple control. Preferred voltage limits are 225-244v rms.
Doesn't seem like you linked in the massive dumpster diving video anywhere. Care to hook us up?
Just did that minutes after release, you were too early!
@@EEVblog much obliged!
I used to work in a steel mill in Watervliet, NY that had three carbon arc furnaces for melting scrap steel. In the control room for each furnace there was a set of colored lamps, red, yellow, and green. In the summer, if the yellow or red lamp came on, the operator was to turn down the furnace to some specific power level. In the rest of the plant there was a siren that when it went off, we had 30 minutes to finish a process and then shut down the machinery. I believe we were given favorable electric rates and in turn, were allowed to be used for load shedding. I wonder if a similar method was used to send commands to our plant.
In France we have a system called Pulsadis and uses a 175Hz carrier. Since a few years ago we now have VERY controversial "Linky" smart power meters which communicate over powerline carrier. They use a standard called G3PLC and uses 36 OFDM carriers between 36kHz and 90kHz
I made a simple window AC thermostat with an Arduino and wanted it to turn on at a zero-switching point of AC. Instead of running a wire to mains, I just hung a few inches of wire off an ADC input and took a look at the waveform. Pretty strong 60 Hz AC pickup. I added some zero-crossing code and a settable delay from when it found a crossing.
As Dave tests out the kit plugged into the mains
water heaters and street lights all over Oz start to switch on and off
Cool!
In North America: I think my power company has a device to connect inline with my air conditioner to control power usage at peak times. I thought it was some kind of wireless device, but I wonder if it's PLC? I actually don't have one anymore to research 🙁
Looks like the unit was originally equipped with only shielded banana jacks for the Mains connection. The power cord looks to be hacked into the unit. Someone drilled out the Neutral Jack.
I feel like this concept will be a good starting point for a research project I am pursuing this semester at university! Thanks Dave, I can always count on you to bring quality content
I'd love to see some decoded messages, more info on the protocols and ofcourse a repair!!
I have been looking into this stuff some months ago, for the 180 hz (enermet receiver) system in my area (belgium), but information is sparse.
It's called CAB (centrale afstandsbediening=central remote-control) in Flanders and Toonfrequent in the Netherlands
www.toonfrequent.nl/
Yep I’ve got an old one of those on my water heater circuit, never bothered to rip it out because the 240v line would be too short. Maine, USA. Think it was a voluntary thing they did back in the 80’s here.
Here one of the local power companies used a 2-tone power line carrier system years ago. They've since gone to a system that uses digital signals. I actually built an MC68705 into the 2-tone generator that was only designed for manual operation. At the time the microprocessor allowed an Apple III to send tones back in the 80's. Later it was connected to an IBM PC-AT.
Absolutely fascinating I have suspected for years that there was some kind of noise(and not 60hz mains frequency)in any mains powered receiver or high gain DIY amplifier but when powering said equipment from a big generator(sine wave of course) the internment interference was always gone. Sometimes there was some interference from the generator but it was from changing current load
Kiwi here. A month or two ago I was messing about with trying to receive radio by using the mains as an antenna, and a big filter to cut out the 50Hz, and I kept getting erroneous non-repeating signals. Could have been zellweger, or maybe it was one of those power-line-communications doorbells. Never captured them with my timebase on right to analyse them.
5:38 That switch looks okay to me. They did a good job of heat-shrink-tubing those connections. However, they should've earthed the front panel!
Here in Germany i had that during the summer when my fan was running all the time (and it was really annoying in the night).
I used a stepdown transformer / variac to throttle a large 130W fan and it was a beeping on a fixed tone for like 3 to 1 seconds over like a minute in the evening hours.
I can remember when i was a kid in the late seventies i could hear these signals through my audio input of my audio amplifier when i touched the input wires. You would hear the normal 50 hz humming and in the background you could hear this intermitting slightly higher humming noise.
I have not seen it used in the US, However, I have used networking based on mains, where i have 2 tranceivers each connected at 2 ends of a building, so long as they are connected to the same leg of the fuse box you can connect Ethernet cables and transmit data through the mains. It was a solution before wifi was common.
Had ripple control in Belast in the 70's. Turned on off peak heating and the fog horns in Belfast lough
I think BPL "Broadcasting over Power Lines" is the predominate system used in the Untied States, It uses HF frequencies and supposedly skips over the HAM bands, and sometimes it does. It is also injected locally. Ron W4BIN
The ripple control receiver (like a radio receiver) has a resonant circuit at the channel frequency. Most modern meters contain one. This voltage is used to drive a relay change !
Here in Ontario Canada we have three different levels of usage, but it's enforced through rates rather than actually enabling or disabling appliances.
I live in Philly and there's only one rate no matter the time of day. I guess they don't have problems with excess demand. It's been like that everywhere else I've lived too, but that's only been the mid-Atlantic region.
In my current apartment though, the heat, hot water, and even the A/C run on gas (central to the building).
USA utility companies use VLF frequencies (carrier frequencies) this RF at low frequencies travels along power lines for long distances.
I believe the system is on its way out however with our push to newer technologies called “smart grid” but initially the utility companies use this for switching transformers and circuit breakers from at remote locations.
Great news! We now have the 2200M band, subject to sharing with utility companies who may not have to share the band with nearby hams. Most experimenters use short, inefficient antennas with very large loading coils. Propagation in this RF region is by surface wave, using vertically polarized antennas. (from ARRL website)
Common in New Zealand, most households have electric hot water systems which are controlled from a ripple control switch for load shedding. Most of the ripple control system is Zellweger brand. The type you showed in the video. Enermet is Landis&Gyr.
Enermet are another player Dave, however Zellwieger are also huge. I believe they were heavily involved very early in the introduction of ripple control. We use the acronym AFLC which stands for Audible Frequency Load Control.
In Hungary we had a similar kind of "audio frequency" ripple control from the mid 70s. It wasn't implemented everywhere. As a child in the end of the 80s I still remember we had a clock type control unit. This was up until the end of the 90s. That's when we had our first neutral line injected control signal. I remember it didn't switched on long enough to heat up like 180liters of water for a family with two kids. Nowadays our oldest and tallest long wave radio tower controls RF switching recievers. It's called Lakihegy Tower. It has a tuneable height of 284-314m. A Blaw-Knox type thingie (the cigar shaped one). E.on broadcasts a DCF or WWV like almost atomic clock precision time signal from it, and of course as I recall a properitary Versacom protocol control signal. Using this I think they even switch at non-regular intervals. The law says they have to add up like 8 hours per day. The interesting technique in the receiver is that it can rotate it's LW ferrite antenna jobbie to best reception.I think we had a PROLAN RRCR110 type unit. Right now my parents have central and I have gas heating, so I can't give up-to-date info on this. If I ever get my hands on a retired unit I'll send it right to you so you can say we're in like Flinn again, but first I'll take it apart too! :)
Same here in NZ, the local power company has to provide no more than 8 hours of "off" time per day for hot water heating. So its usually broken up into several blocks of peaks with the biggest off time being in the evening so your hot water doesnt start heating again until later at night during the off-peak
Do Australians have the option of adding filtering (a 0.01 uF cap) at the fuse-box? :)
Zellweger are known for producing our ripple control receivers that turn our hot water on and off and our street lights etc. The signal is sent on the half hour or the hour. The signal is coded in Decabit. The close to 1 khz signal can be heard in any active motor windings at 10 p.m. keep an ear out..! (Sounds like a long slow morse)
For those of you interested, In Straya the originating ripple signal is injected by the local zone substation via high-voltage equipment. This then passes via the high voltage network to the neighbourhood transformers. Then into your LV switchboard!
nice, i recently picked up a bunch of those ripple meters from the scrap yard, now all i need is this device you are showing in the video, the ripple meters are all stamped 317hz and have 3 different control codes on them, where do i get one of these injectors? haha
I live in Zurich, Switzerland, so it is unlikly to have high loads at the home, as most places get hot water from the city central heating or from gas heaters, but I will run some tests around the time the night tarrif starts, and see what I can capture on the scope. Zellweger appear to be a Swiss company, and Landis and Gyr is also Swiss company, they power meter are very popular in Switzerland, they are also a leader in electric grid automation and metering and control systems. So I wouldn't be surprised to catch some signals around.
You should get that thing working and give it a go. I'm not sure how you'd know whether you're switching your neighbors appliances on and off, perhaps someone will track you down an let you know.
One possible way for utilities to even out demand is to play with voltage. Lower supplied voltage during high-demand times and crank up the voltage during low demand times. I've never monitored voltage over the day but wouldn't be surprised if they do it.
Hi Dave, NSW and QLD were using ripple control up until the introduction of “stupid meters” to control the time of use loads like heat banks, water heaters, the receivers were adjustable for frequency and number of pulses, they could control groups of consumers to control network loading.
It was a shit of a system, since you live in Sydney, I am sure you will remember the beep, beep beeeep, crushing thru every electrical item in your house every week night at around 11PM.
Absolute crunt of a thing.
We have it in NZ and its never been a problem. Ripple control is used for all sorts of things here.
RODALCO2007 has a video of a Zellweger Ripple Injection Plant, the guts running that thing are unique looking.
Handy box when your kids use up all the hotwater in the evening :) Note there is Controlled Load 1 (CL1) and CL2 - CL1 I think is the night time one but CL2 can go on and off during the day and will vary I believe with network load. Cool tutorial video might be to design a filter to detect these so you can plot the on and off times on a Raspberry Pi or something.
I'd be interested in a follow video that suggests how to filter out the injected ripple. It very noticeable in ceiling fans (especially in the quiet of night), fluro globes, LED globes, and cooktop induction heating elements.
I used a lot of those *exact* Motorola 68705 chips back in the day. I still have the programmer. Back then, it was the only real game in town. I still have a bunch of them.
Do you happen to still have this working and be willing to part with it? I have been working for a long time to try and make one of these systems. That would be a very useful device to have because it encodes the DECABIT protocol that I need to test with. I already have been able to inject signals directly into mains on a smaller scale but it uses a large motor-generator set that I made. the protocol I am using right now is K22 as listed on the device but I would like to switch to DECABIT soon. I tried to make one with an arduino but the sheer amount of variables isn't fun to deal with. Thanks for showing this unit, its very cool to see the original Zellweger units around.
EDIT: Some info on the protocols used in case anyone is interested,
the 3-minute transmission time is only for K22 and hybrid systems, k22 used older mechanical receivers and it took 7.5 seconds per channel to transmit the code. They had to transmit all 22 channels filling up that approximate 3 minute time in order to keep all the other receivers in their correct modes. the newer decabit protocol can encode a command in 6.6 seconds. Dave is correct in thinking that the absence of ripple is a 0 and presence is 1, the DECABIT sequence always starts with a start bit which is 1 and then 10 data bits. 5 of the data bits must be 1, and 5 0 to get a total possible 126 combinations. the on telegram (+ on the last digit of the selector) is inverted to make the off telegram. If you want more info, I have too much to tell.
Decabit is 5 bits on / 5 bits off plus start bit. Always total of 5 on and 5 off so there's about 126 valid codes out of 10 bits. The high numbers on the thumb wheels are invalid Decabit codes hence the error light. I actually have a use for one of these developing a decoder for Decabit. Any chance you'd want to off load it?
Really easy: Do you know mains meter tariff switching? That‘s been done with those back in the days... or central street light switching, etc... have a look at rodalco ... he did a very good video on ripple injection
I suspect they send those ripple encodings around midnight. I remember being able to see slight flicker on incandescent lights dimmed down. Might be wrong though :)
Dave, you turned the level pot before error flashing stopped. Try turn it back to half level
good timing. I just learned about ripple rejection while building my first amplifier
Erm, I'm guessing the blue bodge wires were to some external test equipment and used during troubleshooting. They probably gave up on the unit and didn't bother to remove them after.
I discovered Mains Ripple Injection after moving to Queensland and my ceiling fans kept making a a strange buzzing noise for a few minutes or so at the same times each day.
He says "lights to flicker" and indeed lights do flicker at the very exact moment
Here in Greece it´s called "night current" or "night power", it´s injected to the meter to slow it down I presume when it applies. Have heard stories of people trying to cheat it, but I think even during the day the utility company sends the "daytime" signal periodically so it´s not all that easy.
In the UK it is called economy 7, because 7 hours cheap rate. My mum used to have it when I was a lad. I don't know how they trigger it, I figured just timer in the box? There was an led on the meter that lit when active... we had a gas combi boiler so... why mum?
the bananplug sockets are quite unusual and nice
I wonder whether you could influence your electricity bill by feeding the output of the test device into your local mains outlet. E.g. sending the right signal might switch the electricity meter to "off-peak mode".
"Typical 11 kV injection levels are approximately 300V"!!!
Dunno if I'd want to probe ***that*** with anything short of a 25' fiberglass pole! Yikes!
It looks like the decabit example shows a 10-bit code (a number between 0-1023). Deca means 10, so there you go. A decade is 10 years. Hecto means 100 and, of course, kilo means 1000. In Norway they measure fish volume en gros (in bulk) by the HectoLiter (100 liters).
I even looked it up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
In New Zealand we no have never controlled hot water like that. It only gets turned off a during the morning and evening to control network load when people start cooking at night and in the morning.
Can anyone explain to me how the ripple on the mains side is generated? Is the secondary side of the signal transformer just shorted with the MOSFETs at the modulation frequency?
This is the same system that big brother uses to turn off / adjust the temperature of air conditiong systems ie DRED.
It uses the same principle ie data modulated using the power system as a carrier.
I'm surprised that we have not yet seen commercial in-line band pass filters to filter the incoming mains and remove big brothers ability to control our aircons.
Of course most people don't even know its happening so there is that.
who is big brother? ive never heard of them.
@@deadgaming20 if you're American you may know him as Uncle Sam I believe? ;)
Which raises the question how is your uncle also your brother? Perhaps it's best we don't think about it?
@@deadgaming20 But yeah in all honesty its the power companies who decide to turn off or limit the power output of your aircon and not specifically the government.
This system is used by Energex in South East Queensland for controlling hot water systems, pool pumps and other similar loads for demand management.
In the Netherlands a similar system is or was in use. It is used for switching street lights and for switching the energy meter to a lower night rate. Consumers with such a system installed in their energy meter pay a small fee but get the lower night rate.
It is still in use! Not for long though... It's called Toonfrequent (TF) or centrale afstands bediening (CAB). It's being phased out for consumers and business, but I don't know if the street light signal is getting phased out as well. I certainly hope so, it seems to interfere with some LED dimmers which makes them flicker about every half hour. (20:00, 20:30 etc)
You know it's old hardware when it is stamped *CPS.* - 3:05
ElmerFuddGun
yes, like condenser instead of capacitor .
I used to design stuff that used ripple injection in Sydney (decabit). Fairly primitive but effective ripple control stuff.
A decabit is one of ten-hundred-twentyfour states. Just two bits over a byte. What a gourgeous word. I love decabit.
So where I live, Florida Power & Light has what they call their "On-Demand" system where they'll install PLC boxes in front of your water heater, aircon, heat and pool pump. In exchange for a (paltry) credit on your bill, they reserve the right to cut power to those devices for up to 3.5 hours a day to shed load in peak demand times. They can get pretty damn aggressive with it in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane to keep load low on substations and capacity available for critical loads but if I'm honest they really only seem to load-shed is between 3-6PM during the week which can be a bit of an annoyance if you're working from home if they decide to take away your aircon. And they also seem to fail open when they fail, so you've gotta open them up bridge the terminals out and then wait for the power company to rock up to replace the silly buggers and boy do they kick up a fuss when they've found out you did that.
I had just posted a reply about that, they fail open on the relay, its a pain. Around where i live up here in the Midwest they aren't that common anymore, used to see them in every house, but now they don't do it anymore. The old ones were abandoned and as they fail people rip them out or just leave them as a junction box and bypass the wiring inside. Surprised they still use them in Florida, but makes sense. Around here all the small power co-ops took over and as the towns went off the main line providers and became their own co-ops those boxes were just abandoned. My last house had one in it, i tore it out when it failed and the hot water heater didn't work one day. The house i live in now didn't have one and never seems to have or someone else removed it and replaced the wiring to the water heater most likely, thats how most of them disappeared over the years.
In Ireland the low rates are between 1 AM and 8 AM GMT and are switched by clock in the meter box.
That ripple injection is a PAIN in the arse when you are trying to record a high-gain valve amp on the overdrive channel at home! Nothing worse than finding out that your perfect take is loaded with bzzzzzzzzzzzt.................bzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.... hahah
Nice find great for us meter collectors
Be able to make a fully working pre smart meter meter board
aka ripple receiver, 24h power and economy meter
Ive always wondered how the recievers worked back int he 50's to 70's before the microchip receivers became common.
The right angle traces, huh. Looks like an early CAD board right?
Is zellweger still around? Well yes and no. They've been bought by Uster Technologies, which i live very near to (< 1km, the old Zellweger area is being transformed into housings) and they specialize in yarn quality measurements. Also funnily enough, Uster Technologies is the rival company of the company I work for. I'm also getting a suspicion that Zellweger Australia may not be the same zellweger from switzerland
Interesting i never knew how off peak worked and how the meter knew to switch it on. One place i lived at would switch at the wrong time. Meter was inside and you could hear the relay. Didn't try to find out why, didn't care as the times the HWS was on was ok.
Y'all aussies with out a new integrated digital meter will have 2 analog or digital meters and a 3rd rectangle thing with a green switch inside it behind the transparent cover. That green switch is what actually turns on and off from this signal, if you run out of hot water and want to be a cheeky bugger you can break the top seal and flip it on. Although I'm pretty sure if the grid is struggling they just keep sending that ripple to get all the older switches that are a bit sticky.
I flip them on to test hot water or pool pumps if it's in peak times, usually they just stay on but some days they constantly flip off every time I flip it on.
You will also have to be sneaky and make the seal look like you haven't tampered with it, or get a sparky to put in a reseal form, or in most cases I just leave it and the meter reader dude reseals it, being that that top seal doesn't allow you to alter any wiring so there isn't really any foul play that you can do
This Mains Ripple Injection (a DELIBERATE addition of junk to the power-line--what a country!) is the reason that high-frequency bypassing (low-value cap to handle higher frequencies) should be added to ALL DC power supply outputs!
See Dave's excellent video on *bypass capacitors*:
ruclips.net/video/BcJ6UdDx1vg/видео.html
In the US , very rural isolated upstate NY state , REA electric utility , as a teenager playing with /repairing old cheap stereo equipment alot , late 70's or early 80's timeframe . I would often have audio amps on but idle (quiet, no music), sometime with headphones on , I would remember hearing a "faint " high pitched tone , always seemed to be near (a few minutes before) the top of the hour as I remember . I remember only a single tone , duration maybe 10-30 seconds ?? , Don't know the exact audio freq, maybe several Khz ?? quite high.
Otherwise the amp would be perfectly quiet , the rest of the time. I remember I could always count on that high pitched faint tone at the same time each hour after hour.
Over the recent years , I have occasionally searched what this might have been.with no luck. I thought possibly
it was on the power lines , some kind of time signalling tone because alway remember it being a few minute before top of the hour. Or some other kind of power company signalling.
Any Ideas on what this might have been ??
How does this compare to powerline network adapters? Is the technology similar?
Similar principle yes
everytime i hear the word dipswitch it sounds like an insult to call somebody LOL! "you dipswitch you!"
I've seen lots of the relays in domestic DB boards in South Africa but have never seen it actually switch something so I don't know whether the system is still in use over here.
We had similar thing to off-peak here in the UK called "Economy 7"
Helpful information
"Mains Voltage in other stuff" Does this mean you don't need a High Voltage Diff Probe to test mains in an oscilloscope? :P