[Doe Eyes]

How about the equipment in the hospitals or in homes that rely on that frequency for timing for monitoring or medications? Electric motors in your home appliances will have to work harder - creating more heat leading to earlier breakdowns.

From what I can tell, the worst case variance for 60 Hz power would be about .01 Hz. So the frequency could vary from 60.01 to 59.99 Hz. I cannot imagine that the medical industry designs equipment that cannot deal with this level of frequency variance. I also cannot see how this would adversely affect home appliances.

[cc2k]

Doe Eyes wrote:

From what I can tell, the worst case variance for 60 Hz power would be about .01 Hz. So the frequency could vary from 60.01 to 59.99 Hz. I cannot imagine that the medical industry designs equipment that cannot deal with this level of frequency variance. I also cannot see how this would adversely affect home appliances.

OK, I clicked through twice to get to the "AP Exclusive" story. It appears you are correct. That story mentions an error of 14 seconds in one day (14 seconds in 86,400 seconds). That works out to about 0.01Hz for a 60Hz base signal. That should not be a significant deviation in terms of motor reliability. But 14 seconds/day error for clocks is significant.

[dynoman]

The AP article references FERC. Here's a few graphs from FERC that show current frequency variations; They already drop much lower 59.99 Hz. I've never seen less than 59.93 or more than 60.02 where I work, we are in MISO (https://www.midwestiso.org/Pages/Home.aspx) the upper midwest.

[Hawthorn]

>> I also cannot see how this would adversely affect home appliances <<

Aw, c'mon. Don't take away all the fun the complainers on this thread are having!

I mean like, Who wants to know the facts? We'd rather bitch and moan!

[loungitude]

I also cannot see how this would adversely affect home appliances.

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Can you see how it would affect a multi-megawatt transformer or multi-thousand HP industrial motor? Mega-VAR power factor correction system? You know, something that has many, many lives depending on it?