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Reading codes on smart meter

Home Improvement Asked by George White on June 1, 2021

I have flickering lights intermittently for a week or so. A flickering episode can last an hour. My DVM measures a fluctuating 92, to 100, 112. When flickering stops it reads 119 +-1 volt. I’ve called Southern California Edison but have no idea how long it will take for them to come and, of course, my intermittent symptom may be not showing itself when they are on site. I looked at my semi-smart meter and see a sequence I have video’d in case it provides a hint.
I see, cycling –

Sync nEt

888 888888

Pld 151

001 74218

082 001.83

(not 100% sure I see the “.” in the last reading)

EDIT

My UPS starts beeping, unsurprisingly.

Photo of meter
meter photo

Does any of this point to something helpful in diagnosing?

One Answer

Those codes do not mean anything meaningful to the problem.

SCE was out this morning - a very helpful and diligent guy. He said the meter information that was relayed to their central station showed no problems. Maybe being more helpful than SCE policy, he looked at the breakers and the bus bars on the "house side". He also went in the house and put a load test on a sub panel and then looked at at a place a very old panel had been that is now just a giant spaghetti junction box. He convinced me that I have some internal problem. In a new experiment I see that pushing down a 2-slice toaster drops the voltage in a nearby outlet from 118 to 116 and activating the other 2-slices drops it to 114. This is all while I am the the "good state" with no visible flickering.

Got to the bottom of it t turned out to be a soft sort - corroded wires under the dirt in the front yard that went to some long defunct thing. It was on the breaker for a room we hardly ever use and next to it was the breaker that had things behaving intermittently. Eventually became a hard short and got found by the electrician. He thinks the strange behavior at a certain time of day was from the water from the sprinklers filtered down to the wire underground.

Correct answer by George White on June 1, 2021

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