I have heard before of the next door neigbor loosing his neutral, and now his gec/h20 connection and your gec/h2O connection causes added impedence to your neutral return path up the service drop. Your electric bill now goes up. Was this urban myth sparky baloney?
Sounds like a lot of c..p to me. The meter measures voltage and current, if there is a lower voltage there is less flux from the voltage coil, also the full amount of power can't be drawn by appliances.
For resistive loads like heaters and lamps.
e.g. a 1100 watt heater will draw 10 amps at 110 volts. heater R. = 11 ohms.
Now say low voltage at 80 volts the heater R. = still 11 ohms. U=I*R then 80/11 =7.27Amps drawn. Power drawn from mains P=I²R then 582 Watts can be dissipated as heat hence the meter will run a lot slower too. ( this is nearly ½ power for ± 30% mains voltage drop.)
for inductive loadsLow voltage is not ideal for motors in fridges, with lower voltage they have not full torque available to start into a load, e.g. drive the compressor and may stall and draw a high current till the thermal overload kicks in or the motor burns out.
A transformer will provide lower output voltages hence less VA's into it's secondary load.
Switchmode power supplies don't really care to much about lower supply voltages. the duty cycle of the on / off switching time of the powertransistor will change.
