Power [Mostly OT]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 07:32:15AM -0500, phil wrote:
> I've been having something odd happening over the past few weeks -- 
> getting worse -- and wonder if anyone here might have a comment because 
> of being local or because of facilities experience.
> 
> Sometimes various electrical things here turn off for anywhere from an 
> estimated 1/4 second to 5 seconds.  At the same time, other items on 
> the same circuit keep running fine.  When it starts happening, it will 
> continue for maybe ten minutes  with two-or-three of these flickers per 
> minute, happening two-or-three times per day.  (When it started it was 
> more like a couple of "blinks" and then again the next day.)
> 
> The things that are affected include the TV, furnace, refrigerator, 
> ceiling lights....  So far, the computers haven't had a problem, but 
> it's nerve-wracking to be working when the lights suddenly go out!
> 
> Anybody have experience that would point to a cause for this kind of 
> thing?

I have seen a few little blibs in power lately (enough that the UPS
blibbed a message about it for a second).

I guess it may just be a voltage drop caused by a brief overload
(someone turning on something very big?) or something like that.  Some
things of course don't care as much about the exact voltage and wouldn't
really notice a small drop in power, while other things will.  Of course
if the source of the problem is close to you in your neighbourhood, then
somethings loosing power for a moment while other thigns don't could
mean that one of the 2 phases is being overloaded by something in the
area and lowering it's voltage, while the other phase is unaffected.
That way anyting connected to one side of your electrical panel will be
ok while stuff connected to the other side would see the power drop.

Just speculation on my part, I have no idea what the real cause is of
course.  Maybe it's something in your house drawing too much power from
one part of the circuit.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml