Voltage Complaint

[ban-all-sheds]

A large, high-density housing development with NSH?

 

[JohnW2]

Most heating loads are thermostatic, so for an individual heating load a long term voltage reduction would be expected to decrease the peak current but increase the average current.

Indeed so. That's an extension of my comment that a lower voltage would result in a kettle drawing a lower current, but drawing that current for a longer time, to boil its contents.

What it does on a large collection of heating loads would depend heavilly on what if any correlation there is between their switch on times.

Again, indeed. The actual on/off times of the thermostats would probably be pretty random, so that would probably average out fairly well. If one assumes that the thermostats are, on average, fairly good at bringing about extraction of the same amount of energy/time (i.e. power), then there would be no getting away from the fact that the average current drawn (hence roughly the 'average of averages' of many of them, if things were fairly random) wouuld be inversely proportional to voltage - so, on reflection, I think that Simon's point may well be a pretty significant one. However, to complicate matters, what probably matters most to the DNOs is the 'peak of the average of averages' - which, as you say, would be heavily dependent on factors which are not necessarily very predictable.

Kind Regards, John