Brownouts, shorts, explosions and the unix pc.

[Thad P Floryan]

afc at shibaya.lonestar.org (Augustine Cano)
in <1991Jan5.045917.7018 at shibaya.lonestar.org> writes:

	[...]
	On another occasion, the power went crazy; not in the orderly and
	predictable fashion described above.  This time the fluctuations were
	completely random and even more serious.  This also went on for at
	least 30 seconds.  Amazingly, I could hear explosions from outside,
	perfectly synchronized with the power fluctuations.  I thought a
	transformer was about to blow up but everything went back to normal.
	[...]

You SURE you don't live in my neighborhood?  :-)   The power pole out in my
backyard has a habit of spontaneously spitting flames, incredible sparks
running up and down the WOOD pole (who said wood was nonductive?  not in
California it ain't! :-), and otherwise being a general nuisance.

UPS and surge protection for all my systems are the only reasons my systems
are still "alive" today.  Seriously.  I've posted some real horror stories to
some other newsgroups, the worst being when one surge protector burst into
flames and I grabbed it and tossed it out the window ... what caused this
was the power service suddenly experienced an "open neutral" according to
PG&E, causing some 250V+ to be on the lines instead of the nominal 120..  I
proved "negligence" on the part of PG&E and received full $$$ replacement to
buy new protection; point being, NONE of my computers or other electronic
equipment were affected; the surge protector DID work by suiciding and saving
everything else.  I shed a tear and gave it a decent burial.

Other cases prior to my "getting smart" and getting surge and UPS protection,
not so dramatic, include disk R/W errors caused by such "innocent" things as
refrigerator kicking in, turning on/off flourescent lamps, operating a drill
motor in my garage, turning a modem on/off, etc.

In ALL seriousness, if you're NOT operating with at least surge and transient
suppression on the line servicing your computer(s), you're asking for trouble.

And do NOT scrimp on quality to save a few bucks, you'll be sorry.  I had put
out bids to several local companies for surge/transient suppression and UPS
protection and learned some interesting things.

For one thing, Radio Shack surge protectors are simply junk.  We opened one
up and compared it to the ones I finally bought(GTE); difference was like that
between night and day.  I also put GTE suppressors on my phone lines to
parallel the lightning arrestors supplied by PacBell.  Another thing I learned
was that some surge and transient "suppressors" are so poorly enginerred (sic)
they actually MULTIPLY the incoming spikes!  The only saving grace with those
(bad ones) was that you'll never get over 4,000 volts coming into your system
because the distance between the prongs on a conventional AC plug is the spark
gap for 4,000 volts!

As for UPS systems, I got the (sine wave) ones from SAFE (which, by the way,
are also the ones used by Convergent ... I didn't know this at the time).

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]