[RE-wrenches] 208V residential service

[Mac Lewis]

Hi Dave,

Yes, we have run into this. In our area, it tends to be on homes near
commercial zones. Our utility will not change anything for us so we have
learned to be on the lookout for this scenario.

It's possible that the utility can tap to a higher voltage for you.  You
may be able to use a transformer to get to 240 Vac but that will come with
quite a bit of loss. I'd recommend swapping to a 208 compatible system if
the utility can't help.

Good luck !


On Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 6:26 AM Dave Tedeyan via RE-wrenches <
re-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I was just out of town installing a system for a friend just North of NYC.
> I was confused when checking phase for consumption CT's when I found that
> there was 120V L-N, but 206V L-L. I went and found the transformer, and
> there was in fact one transformer for all the houses that I could see. It
> had 4 wires coming out of it, and each house was tapped onto 3 of them. So
> they actually are just using two legs of a 3 phase 208/120V distribution
> system.
>
> Has anyone seen this sort of thing before? I was amazed that a bunch of
> houses there all have 208V L-L, and it seems to not be causing problems.
> Granted my friend says his A/C is really weak and that they have had some
> funky problems with their electric oven. But they also just moved in last
> year, don't have many 240V (or 208V) appliances, and are not very
> electrical savvy, so they were clueless about this.
>
> Unfortunately this means that all the Enphase IQ8A's I just put on their
> roof are useless, unless I go back to put in a transformer or get the
> utility to do something about it. I am going to call the utility (Con Ed),
> but I was just curious if anyone has had a similar experience and whether
> their utility was open to changing it to 240V.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
> --
>
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