Dirty Hydro?

Christopher Friedt cfriedt-u6hQ6WWl8Q3d1t4wvoaeXtBPR1lH4CV8 at public.gmane.org
Wed May 2 07:26:41 UTC 2007


A decent power supply in your computer should be able to handle a swing 
of  +/- 5 V from 120V AC no problem, that's a margin of less than +/- 
5%. In your case, the margin is even smaller.

Quite often a power supply will also be rated for something like 
115-230V. I would check your power supply rating and also see how much 
power it can deliver.

What happens exactly to your computer? Does it just freeze? Does it 
reboot randomly?

I had that problem a while ago, and I realized that I naively had put 
too many components into my box and they were drawing too much power 
than my older cheap PSU could reliably deliver. (For those that read my 
ad for a computer to sell, no worries, I am speaking of its predecessor).

One of my old professors actually gave me some invaluable advice - never 
go cheap when considering the power supply for your computer (or 
anything for that matter), because you never know if the mainboard could 
actually suffer long term damage from dropping below minimum operating 
voltages.

Quite often, if it drops below a minimum operating voltage, the system 
will reboot itself or just hang. If it reboots, that's the mainboard 
trying to protect itself.

When it hangs, all of the components on the board are under some stress. 
For instance, they could be pushing or pulling more current than normal 
and the silicon could suffer from some long term injuries.


~/Chris

tleslie wrote:
> see if you can do the test at your neighbour.
> 
> if its ok there, then sound to me like you either have
> something in your house that pulls up the ground in cycles,
> as per your statement,
> or you have a bum transform.
> 
> i could imagine a dehumidifer, or something with a motor,
> that is pulsating on a motor restriction at 5t/s
> pulling up your ground (old houses can have crappy or cheated grounds).
> 
> you could have a shit multimeter as well but i doubt that.
> 
> but i do my own house wiring, and have multimetered
> many a home, i have never seen a cycle like your taking unless
> there is some bad ass appliance near by.
> 
> but even with that cycle, most stuff in your home should work fine.
> I'd be more concerned with why its doing for other reasons
> and be proactive against something that could be bad.
> 
> 
> 
> -tl
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 19:35 -0400, 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
>>
> 
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