Well, this morning we got a rather rude awakening, our power company had some issues and we ended up with a power spike that hit 142v then dropped down to 135v and stayed there for 2 minutes. What woke us up was three breakers tripping, the snap they make when they trip woke us. I got up and smelled a burning electrical smell. At first we thought it was something in the house that started it all, I'm glad it wasn't but we lost 2 surge protectors (stuff that was plugged in to them was fine). The worst, and what we smelled burning, was our sub-woofer, which was plugged into the wall (my bad). It fried the transformer inside and we're not sure what damage might be done to the circuit board and all the other goodies in there. So now we have to get that fixed and buy 3 new surge protectors, 2 to replace the ones that fried and one for the sub-woofer when we get it fixed/replaced!! Damnit!!

 

good mornin!

 

That sucks to hear the bad news WMR. It could have been alot worse, thank God it wasn't.


:santa:

 

Sorry to hear that Rose.....but I guess you should consider yourself lucky.

 

Yea, it could have been worse. Thank God we have surge protectors for all the TV's, stereos and computers and they seem to have done what they were meant to do. I didn't even occur to me to put one on the sub-woofer though, just plugged it in, won't happen again!

 

Shocking.

Glad your ok.

 

wow ive never heard of anything like that happening

 

WOW...Sorry to hear that Rose. Glad the house is ok. I guess I better double check and make sure all my stuff is on surge protectors.



BREW

 

You might want to file a claim with the power company. For something like a surge, they may pay for the damages

 

Same thing happened to me a few years ago, and our power company bought me a new motherboard and power supply. They were pretty good about it too.

 

Wow, Sorry to hear about that, Thank goodness it wasn't worse. I can only imagine what kind of damage could be caused to things like refrigerator, furnace fan, freezer and stuff like that. I guess I'd better start buying some of them surge protectors. I only have one and that's for my computer, never thought about the other electronics around the house. Hope everything works out for you.

 

They sell whole-house surge supressors that will prevent just that thing from happening. The bleed off the excess of the spike to ground to protect the house. I haven't installed mine yet, but maybe I should get off my duff and get it done!! What in the world did the power company do to cause that?? Cross a 220 line over a 110??

Also, I'm curious: How did you know what exactly happened to that line coming in? Just wondering how you monitor your incoming power like that?

-Joe

 

You should get one of these instead of a simple surge protector:
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_g...=MP%20SW%20200

 

Already in the works but I'm not holding out much hope, they've already told several people they weren't paying for anything

Whole house surge suppressor?? Where could I find something like that and how much do they cost??

No one seems to know exactly what happened, some people are saying a tree fell on the lines somewhere but I really have no idea.
My boss has surge suppressor thingie, it has an LED readout on the front that constantly monitors the voltage coming into the store. He happened to be standing close to it when the lights started blinking so he looked at it to see what was happening. It read 142v for a few seconds and then dropped down to 135v and stayed there for about 2 minutes. Since the store is only about 3 miles from my house I figure we had the same surge.

 

Do a google for exact phrase "surge suppressor".
Then search within results for exact phrase "whole house".

I found quite a few on the internet. What brand is best, I don't know. I see them from about $80 up. You could probably install it yourself, but me I would get an electrician. I know me and electricity don't necessarily mix well.