Anyone know what this is?

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vreihen

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The picture isn't clear, but it appears to be a drum-shaped thing on the right side of the pole, connected to a box on the left side of the pole by several color-coded coax or fiber cables. It just popped up in the past month, and is in a neighborhood where I personally manage most of the telecom services. It doesn't make sense for the CATV or Verizon FIOS to have neighborhood controllers there. Is it a 4G micro-cell? Part of the Shot-Spotter system that the city is installing? Ironically, my wife's power company contractor crew planted the pole back in December, and she also has no idea what this equipment is.....
 
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vreihen

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The city of Newburgh was the site of one of the first power generator stations in the world, personally supervised by Thomas Edison. I don't know if it works the same as in other small cities, but the power company is the owner/installer of all poles and everyone else pays them for attachments. (My employer rents about a dozen pole attachments for my aerial fiber to facilities across the streets from our main complex.)

AFAIK, the power company has no capital projects for remote meter reading, and the majority of their meters are still analog spinning wheels. Long story short, I don't think that this equipment belongs to the power company -- if for no other reason than it is attached in the telecom "band" on the pole and not the power company's secondary line and primary distribution bands above.....
 
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DV52

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vreihen: what - you guys still use rotating wheel kwhr meters to measure power consumption? Outrageous in the 21st century!! It's about time America implemented time-of-use electrical tariffs and 5 minute pricing for wholesale purchases.

The pole to the right of the new pole in your picture has an "X" painted on it -I'm not sure of the practices in your part of the word, but down here we do this for "condemned poles". So I'm guessing that the initial purpose for the new pole was as a replacement (I expect that the service wires on the new pole were transferred over and that the old pole will be removed some time shortly). Also, the presence of the "stay wire" on the left hand side of the new pole and the additional height of the new pole suggests that the power company has additional works in mind. The "stay wire" suggests that the pole will hold a larger cable heading to the right of the picture -up the street (it doesn't make sense to support the pole on the LHS purely to counter balance the weight of the service wire running across the street). So I suspect that your new neighborhood "phallic symbol" is a work-in-progress - still.

It looks like the pole has a "cut-and-termination" from an underground cable (lower down). Does this part of Newburgh have voltage problems? Could the "can" be a capacitor to boost volts (perhaps)?

Don

PS: why are all the cars in the picture parked in the wrong direction;)?
 
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vreihen: what - you guys still use rotating wheel kwhr meters to measure power consumption? Outrageous in the 21st century!!

Most properties in the UK also still use rotating wheel kWHr meters too!

Why?

Because the rollout of electron smart meters has suffered some major "howlers" - the most recent being when domestic consumers woke to find their smart meters showing they had used up to £20,000 of electricity overnight (instead of the expected and actual closer to £2).

The manufacturers blamed a software issue - easy to fix you would have thought using an OTA update? But no, OTA either isn't in the software in the meter or in the central software either.

As well as that most UK smart meters currently installed are designed to a pre-release version of the specification which mens when you change energy supplier you have to change the meter also. To make that even worse the manufacturers have said they doubt whether pre-release version meters can even be upgraded when sent "back to base".

So smart meters have quickly gained a VERY bad reputation here, which will take a lot of work (and I suspect along time) to recover from.
 
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What I want to know is, who is responsible for cutting the grass at Mount Saint Mary College?...lol.

...which means when you change energy supplier

Change energy supplier?...Wow...I can only imagine having the ability to do that. We only have one supplier.

As for the device on the pole...I say it's a micro-cell...or mini-cell, and I'd say be prepared to start seeing a lot more of them.
 
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vreihen

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What I want to know is, who is responsible for cutting the grass at Mount Saint Mary College?...lol.

It would be unfair to judge by that one picture, as their grounds are meticulously maintained from what I've seen. There is a baseball field uphill of that, and my guess is that it was intentionally done as either a no-spray insect control thing or as a "trap" to prevent errant baseballs from bouncing over the fence and damaging cars. Or, knowing that the intersection to the right is a major recreational pharmaceutical exchange point, perhaps the long grass is there as a community service so that the neighborhood merchants have a place to toss their products when the police pay one of their regular visits? :p

Change energy supplier?...Wow...I can only imagine having the ability to do that. We only have one supplier.

We play a shell game here, where the old power companies act as the distribution network for a bulk of the monthly charges, but you can pick who you want them to buy your power from on the regional grid. Makes hippies and tree-huggers feel good to only be buying "clean" power, but in reality they have no way of actually measuring exact uses per-provider for billing...and certainly no end-to-end per-electron accounting.

As for the device on the pole...I say it's a micro-cell...or mini-cell, and I'd say be prepared to start seeing a lot more of them.

Actually, you are more or less correct. I just found this:

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1893580-Verizon-Small-Cell-oDAS-Thread/page18

oDAS = Outdoor Distributed Antenna System. The neighborhood location does not make sense from an RF perspective, but perhaps they are trying to fill in a small gap/shadow in their coverage?????
 
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vreihen

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Yes, Don, the X means the same thing up here. The fact that the power company "topped" the old pole and didn't move their transmission stuff onto the new one leads me to believe that they are not going to use it any more, and perhaps they put in the taller pole so that whichever cellular carrier is renting it can have the option of placing their antennas up higher?????

FWIW, the guy wire to the right is anchoring a heavily-loaded pole on the other side of the street, and the guy wire on the left is anchoring that tension to the ground.....
 
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Rembrant

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We play a shell game here, where the old power companies act as the distribution network for a bulk of the monthly charges, but you can pick who you want them to buy your power from on the regional grid. Makes hippies and tree-huggers feel good to only be buying "clean" power, but in reality they have no way of actually measuring exact uses per-provider for billing...and certainly no end-to-end per-electron accounting.

Where I live, the grid is owned by one company...we have no other options of any kind if we want to buy electricity. Most of that electricity is still generated by burning coal, but there are some wind farms scattered around, and a handful of hydro plants. We have one nuclear plant out here on the east coast...and it runs...sometimes...maybe, when it isn't shutdown for various reasons.

I learned something interesting recently...I was in upstate NY for some OEM VFD training...Finger Lakes area, and there was a guy in the class that is in the electric motor and control business. He was telling me that in some areas in northern NY, the commercial voltage is 575vac 3ph...which is Canadian...so to speak. Electricity crossing the border is nothing new of course...but it was the first I had ever heard of our 575-600vac power being used on the US side of the line. As far as I ever knew, "American Voltage" was 460vac.
I figured they would have stepped that voltage down for continuity sake...but perhaps it didn't make sense based on geography, or whatever.
 
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Stingray... you know, for your protection.... or whatever line of crap they tell us. :rolleyes:
 
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Makes hippies and tree-huggers feel good to only be buying "clean" power, but in reality they have no way of actually measuring exact uses per-provider for billing...and certainly no end-to-end per-electron accounting.
Which is something many "Green tree huggers" just don't understand when they say "I only use Green electricity" - and get most upset when you tell them that's untrue, like everyone they use whatever electrons find the easiest path from generator to their home or office so they could be paying a premium price for "Green" electricity and actually using electrons from a coal power station.
 
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Which is something many "Green tree huggers" just don't understand when they say "I only use Green electricity" - and get most upset when you tell them that's untrue, like everyone they use whatever electrons find the easiest path from generator to their home or office so they could be paying a premium price for "Green" electricity and actually using electrons from a coal power station.
Well, there is something to be said for allowing those people to spend their money as they wish. I'd rather the "Green tree huggers" pay for the windmills and solar farms (that need to be backed up with conventional generating capacity anyway) than all of us having to pay for it.

-Uwe-
 
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Most properties in the UK also still use rotating wheel kWHr meters too!

Why?

So smart meters have quickly gained a VERY bad reputation here, which will take a lot of work (and I suspect along time) to recover from.

Dave:I'm aware that like us, you guys have a time based spot price for wholesale electricity - which very much lends itself to electronic meters. I'm also aware of lots of conspiracy theories among domestic consumers about smart meters (they are alive and kicking down here too).

The fact is that electricity retailers in a spot market environment ostensibly take the variable wholesale prices (for purchases on the spot market) and they convert these to fixed retail tariffs to domestic customers (like you and me) - plus a nice profit margin for their shareholder. The problem with the price of fixed retail tariffs that result from this Wholesale/retail conversion process is that they are ALL based on averages and therefore they suffer from the law-of-averages.

So- to give you a sense of the variation between peak and normal prices that the averaging process must accommodate on the wholesale, spot market - the underlying commodity price for Australia sits at about $60-$80/mwhr, but the maximum price can (and has) risen as high as $12,000/mwhr (this is called Voll). Your electricity market is similar.

What this means is that your fixed retail tariff assumes that your usage pattern is the same as someone with a much more "peaky" usage profile. Which means that there is a whole lot of cross subsidization that occurs within a particular tariff cohort. This is great if you happen to be a consumer with a "peaky" profile, but it's not so good if you happen to have a normal usage profile!

So, the interesting question about cross subsidizing in retail fixed tariffs is - who is paying and who is being subsidized? Well it works-out (not surprisingly perhaps) that folk who have lots of electrical appliances and who invariably have high usage tend to be the ones who have "peakier" load profiles.

Moral of the story - fixed retail electricity tariffs invariably impose a perverse outcome where the poor subsidize the rich. Spinning wheel kwhr meters reinforce this perversity and they are a relic of a bygone era when the electricity industry was a vertically integrated monopoly. Fact is that lots of changes have been made since those prehistoric times - I for one am not happy to support wealthy (read -high usage) electricity consumers and I am very happy to be using a smart meter

Now, I'm sorry to read that in your part of the world changing meters is an impediment to changing retailers, but this is a problem with your regulation rules (it's not a problem with smart meters). Down here, all the meters are owned by a separate entity (monopoly service provider with regulated prices). We keep the same meter when we change retailer!

Don
 
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Well, there is something to be said for allowing those people to spend their money as they wish. I'd rather the "Green tree huggers" pay for the windmills and solar farms (that need to be backed up with conventional generating capacity anyway) than all of us having to pay for it.

-Uwe-

Uwe: wise idiom - folk should indeed be allowed to spend their money as they see fit and there can be no doubt that in the future, the mix of generation will be both a mix of windmills and solar farms - as well as more conventional plant.

But the problem is that electrons don't make the distinction between tree-huggers and tree-cutters! Alas your average, every day electron is entirely ambivalent to this dynamic and it just goes about honoring the basic rules of physics.

What this means is that because there is only one electricity system to supply a community, the wants of tree-huggers and the needs of tree-cutters are not indivisible. They affect the same infrastructure and they very much impact on the reliability of the central network.

We had an instance down here recently where South Australia (a state in our federation) had a particularly "green" policy regarding new generation and they installed massive wind-mill farms (and they shut down conventional spinning rotor generators). All went well until a recent storm shut down the electrical inter-connector into the South Australia (from the rest of Australia) effectively electrically island-ing the state. So the wind generators became the predominant form of supply for a large part of Southern Australia. The loss of the large inertia from Australia's convention spinning rotor generators meant that South Australia couldn't maintain its 50hz frequency (the rotors in the wind generators were just too small)- result, the electrical grid became unstable and the state went to system-black!!

Moral of the story tree-huggers and tree-cutters are in this together - one can't ignore the other 'cause them electrons won't allow it!!

Don
 
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Incoming NostraJackAss rant about how demand meters are the work of the devil in 3...2...1..... :)
 
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Commercial and industrial users have had peak demand reading meters for a long, long time. Back in the 1990s, Bruce and I were involved in a custom/specialty transformer and controls business. The biggest electrical consumers we had were two baking ovens and two annealing furnaces. You should see what it did to our electricity bill in those rare months when we ran both annealing furnaces at the same time for some reason.

In many places, commercial and industrial users also have their power factor monitored and get surcharged for any significant divergence from 1.0. Power factor is mathematically expressed as the phase angle between current and voltage, but is often caused by peaky (non uniform) draw during the AC voltage wave-form, e.g. from phase-fired SCR controls, or on a residential scale, light dimmers.

-Uwe-
 
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DV52

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In many places, commercial and industrial users also have their power factor monitored and get surcharged for any significant divergence from 1.0. Power factor is mathematically expressed as the phase angle between current and voltage, but is often caused by peaky (non uniform) draw during the AC voltage wave-form, e.g. from phase-fired SCR controls, or on a residential scale, light dimmers.

-Uwe-

Uwe: I suspect the reason why industrial customers up there are penalised for poor power factors is because the electricity authority is still charging for KWhr usage, but they are supplying the industrial/commercial premises also with large amounts of KVAR (i.e. the consumer is using both real and reactive power, but is paying only for real power).

Again these types of industrial/commercial retail tariffs are a relic of a bygone era (notwithstanding that they are time-of-use tariffs) where the only devices that were available to measure consumption were the old-fashion spinning disk meters. Fact is though that it costs money to provide reactive power (i.e. KVAR): more fuel is burned if the generators are over-excited.

The proper answer for these poor power factor sites is for the supply authority to charge on the basis of KVA - that way supply costs align with retail charges

Don

PS: Of course the other answer is to use DC instead!!;)

powertriangle1.jpg
 
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PS: Of course the other answer is to use DC instead!!;)

If Thomas Edison's DC grid won out over Tesla's AC grid, it would have meant a gazillion more small generators close to the point of consumption. Considering how "the grid" has grown so large that it is a target for terrorists/hackers and is a huge single point of failure, I'm starting to think that the world would have been a better place without Tesla's interference. Of course, the lamp cord on your desk would probably be made with 2-gauge wire..... :)
 
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