Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry
LJN's Business Objectives Group (BOG) is for any Pro serious about building their business.
For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.
Replies
You should really only be getting around 220v from them so something is seriously wrong somewhere.
249 volts is common particularly if you and your neighbours have solar panels on your roofs.
280 volts is excessive, either the reading from the multimeter is not accurate or there is a fault on electric supply network.
I would tend to go with it being a dodgy meter reading particularly as everything else is lower, unless you have a three phase electric supply and the pump is supplied from a different phase to the other appliances.
If you do have a three phase supply with appliances supplied from different phases if one has gone up I would expect the others to go down, so with one at 280 volts I would expect the others to less than 220 volts, but strange things happen.
This is why electric vehicle chargers can use voltage monitoring to detect broken neutral conductors (Open-PEN) in the suppliers network, if an newish EV charger detected 280 volts it would shut down.
It’s worth keeping an eye on the voltage and taking it further if it doesn’t stay between 216 to 253 volts.
Mind that capacitor a young electrician was killed by one in a washing machine that was unplugged.
I should have said that if you do have 280 volts on your supply you could be getting severe tingles off any earthed metalwork such as pipes, the outside tap, appliances such as your cooker, because they may have a voltage on them.
Thanks for your comments, guys.
I have tried the meter on various other outlets and they all read 249v. It's just the pump wiring that gives the high reading.
Thanks for the capacitor warning, Andrew.
A friend of mine knows an electrician. He's going to raise the question, so if I find out any fresh info I'll report back.
I avoid working in appliances and don't claim specific knowledge on repairing them.
If the capacitor is faulty the pump will draw too much current and blow the fuse and/or trip the circuit breaker as happened a bit back with one of my customers commercial pressure washer. I let the service engineer sort that out.
When the same customer phoned to say their ten year old submersible sewage transfer pump had packed up and I found out a new one was less than two hundred quid you can quess what my reply was.
Whilst it feels good to repair things I do try and be realistic.
I wasn't going to try repairing it; it's probably a sealed unit anyway. I was more interested in the rogue reading. Didn't experience a blown trip. If I manage to get hold of this electrician guy I'll let you know what he says.
Thanks for all your helpful comments