Good evening…A question before I may need to call an electrician. At the hight of storm Darragh yesterday evening our electric went…It went the same time as several others in our area. Our electrics are prehistoric and EDF told us they could see via the Linky that one of our phases was down and is our problem…This was all wired up by the previous French owner and despite being bordellic has worked well for years. We now have power in a separate garage but not in the house. I’ve checked all fuses etc. I understand stuff breaks down but it happened during a storm along with other properties losing power which have now mostly been restored…Can I loose a phase in a storm or is it simply a coincidence that I lost it at this time?.. Thanks for reading.
You clearly need a competent person to make an assessment.
First port of call is to check the output of the main disjoncteur de branchement. ENEDIS may well be right & that all three phases are present at the Linky. That doesn’t immediately shift responsibility on to you as the main DdB is also their property & could well be faulty.
If the DdB isn’t at fault then, yes, it’s all down to your installation needing a proper bit of fault finding.
Without any more info that is all that can said at this stage.
What I assume is my main three phase DbB is set to 30 amps. With one car charger (with a load balancer) and soon to be two and everything else in the house including heating hanging off this I think I may need to up it a bit. The house has tripped a couple of times in the last few weeks. I believe ENEDIS come out and do it. Do you think I should?
Supplementary question 
you know the table top energy meters that EDF supply FOC in the UK. Can I buy one here so I can monitor usage in real time?
Thanks Badger.
30 amps for each phase?
Good question Nigel. I’m not very good on electrical stuff, I should have done a basic course sometime. I’ve just looked at the box and it does have three little holes showing 30.
That is correct.
@John_Scully probably has an 18kVA subscription but nowadays it’s the Linky that enforces that.
What tripped? The DdB or the Linky?
Thank you
The DdB
Interesting. I’m guessing you have an 18kVA supply i.e. the rating of the Linky matches that of the DdB? Check the screen that says ‘puissance coupe’.
When a Linky is installed the DdB should be set to it’s highest highest possible rating, so as to allow remote increases in the puissance souscrite. In your case that would be to 60A per phase i.e. 36kVA. The Linky then governs the trip point but if the settings are both the same you could find that the DdB trips first.
However, your local supply cabling may well be too small for that potential amount of power & the installers will have pragmatically left the DbB alone. Asking for an increase may well trigger a bit more than a remote Linky upgrade.
Don’t forget that you can see your historic maximum demand via the ENDIS (& other) apps.
P.S. Don’t forget that DdB can also trip if it detects a fault level higher than 500mA i.e it might not be overload that trips it - it could be a culmination of faults across the installation, but that is fairly unlikely if all other circuits are behind 30mA différentiels, as they should be.
Tri-phase Linky with an 18kVA subscription will also trip if you try to draw more than 7-8kVA on any phase.
That is a good thing to have mentioned.
I’ve seen many triphasé installations where the client can’t keep the power on because an installer hasn’t understood about balancing loads across the phases, even to the extent of completely ignoring two phases & getting the client to pay for a subscription to 200% more power than they need 
Many thanks…Nothing at all tripped… Everything stayed on…except the supply into the house.
Thankyou…We don’t have much stuff that draws power. Simply sat there watching the box not cooking or washing etc…Just as the wind and rain hit a scary level… everything went off but nothing tripped…all switches still on
Thank you all. I now understand better, and I suspect I’m suffering from phase imbalance. I’ve a good electrician who mentioned that quite a while ago but his health isn’t great and the guy he “recommended” is a plonker.
It probably doesn’t matter in a domestic setting - several houses will be supplied and there’s a good chance the load will balance overall.
In fact it’s almost impossible to balance a single domestic installation. Suppose you have an induction, a cauffe-eau and a tumble dryer which your sparky thoughtfully balanced across phases. What do you do if only one is running?
The bloody thing tripped agin this evening, without the car being even being plugged in It just pisses me off, but if my wife was here on her own it’s a much more serious matter. I’ve never had houses tripping out in other countries I’ve lived in.
When I talk about balancing a domestic triphasé installation it’s not due to any concern about the grid - that’s big enough to look after itself.
However, the trick is to use the supply as efficiently as possible i.e. to not to have a larger overall supply than one really needs. To that end you have to consider what single phase loads might be on at the same time & arrange them to be on different phases as much as possible.
Clearly having a triphasé water heater helps, & space heating needs to be spread sensibly too.
Which implies that you have too much going on on one phase or, as previously mentioned, you have an actual fault that is tripping the différentiel side of the DdB.
If you look at your Linky before midnight you can see the maximum power drawn on each phase since the previous midnight (there’s PUISSANCE MAX in total, then 3 more screens that shown L1/L2/L3, all in VA). That should identify the heaviest used phase.
Great insight @Badger , thanks. I’ll check that out.
We had a brief but quite violent/close thunderstorm just before Xmas, it tripped our power but caused no damage here (ups and surge protectors) but a french neighbour had some appliance damage (livebox, tv). Since then his EDF et Moi app hasn’t updated and on checking his Linky, the display is blank despite pressing the buttons and the little green led doesn’t flash, but they do have electricity.
I think their Linky is fried, but they have no way of checking their consumption and are now wondering if they’ve got free electricity (or had free electricity for the last 2 weeks). Maybe @Badger can advise?
If the meter is cooked and not sending any data back to EDF, I would have thought they would already know about it and would have changed it pronto, or am I overestimating their smartness?
Sadly it works the other way. They’ll start being estimated, which is a BAD thing.
A neighbouring holiday home had a Linky failure during the owners long lockdown absence & EDF estimated their consumption as if the place was fully occupied. I had to help them fight EDF’s demands for approx. 600€ of estimated consumption. We won!
Potentially, yes. They need to get in touch with ENEDIS (not EDF) a.s.a.p. to at least get the problem logged.
The faults number is 09 72 67 50 XX, where XX is your/their department number.