Dirty Hydro?

[James Knott]

Scott Elcomb wrote:
> Hey all, hope thing's have been good for TLUGgers the last few months.
> Quite a bit's happened on my end, having accumulated several thousand
> mail messages while I've been offline.  While I'm going through those,
> I'm hoping someone on the list might be able to answer a quick
> question...
>
> I've moved back to Hamilton, into an older building.  The system I had
> was intermittently hanging, so I started to upgrade.  I've now
> replaced everything except the CD-RW drive but this new system is
> doing exactly the same thing (albiet much more frequently.)
>
> It's been about 10-15 years since I've done serious electrical or
> electronics work and I'm not sure if what I'm seeing constitutes
> "dirty hydro."  I picked up a digital multimeter and started checking
> the outlets here - the voltages appear to be fluctuating between
> 118.5V and 120.5V roughly 5-8 times per second in steps of about +/-
> 0.35V.
>
> Before I go purchase a line conditioner or an isolation transformer,
> does anyone onlist have any suggestions or comments?
>
> As always, TIA!
> - Scott
>
Your power does seem a bit erratic.  The best thing, is to get a UPS. 
It should smooth things out a bit.  Also beyond changing voltage, a
multimeter won't tell you much.  There are power line analyzers that can
tell you much more.  Also those voltage changes could indicate wiring
problems, particularly if you've got aluminum wiring.  That's something
that should be investigated.


-- 
Use OpenOffice.org <http://www.openoffice.org>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists