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Jgrubbtoday at 12:19 PM2 repliesview on HN

I read and article on here some months ago titled something like "Leftist usecases for LLMs" and one of them was negotiating bureaucracies, and that reminds me, I need to call back JCP&L about my Board of Public Utilities complaint that an LLM helped me out together.

You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120v service a lot of the time. We live about 200 yards from the transformer that we share with several other houses, too many I believe. About two years ago I set up Home Assistant and bought one of those power monitoring rigs that you put on each circuit in your breaker box, mostly I just wanted data about where my power bill money was going. I work in FinOps in case anyone was curious.

Anyhoo, couple years later I'm analyzing several months worth of power bills vs the circuit meter readings to quantify where I can make some upgrades and save some money. After a day or so of this I mention to Claude about the voltage issues and sure enough, it puts together a whole packet for me documenting brownouts down to 95v and routine brownouts below 110v. It helps me fill out the BPU complaint form.

2 days later I get a call from JCP&L (unfortunately to my wife's phone because it's her name as the primary on the account). I want a new, larger transformer for myself and my neighbors, so I need to call them back today.


Replies

bigfishrunningtoday at 12:53 PM

If you were monitoring the power coming into your house, why did you need claude to "put together a whole packet documenting brownouts"? Shouldn't you just have the raw data, maybe highlighted with the offending parts? Or was the prose of your complaint the issue?

show 2 replies
quickthrowmantoday at 5:06 PM

How big is the transformer and how many residences are sharing it? It’s probably stencil painted on the enclosure.

I’ve seen half a dozen houses on a single 7.2kV -> 240V 25kva transformer which can lead to problems given the available current on the secondary side is only 104A. As the transformer overheats you get voltage drop, as you’ve noticed ;)

Your supply voltage should be +/- 5% of nominal, 115-125V line to neutral and 230-250V line to line, appliances are generally OK with +/- 10% from nominal voltage.