On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 08:24:38AM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote:
I live close to the exhibition grounds which is near to one of the city's major grid switches. For example, they were testing the new streetcars, the ones with three sections for navigating tight turns and they browned us down to (I assume) 50hz. This was visible as all the lights dimmed and the streetcar appeared to navigate the loop a short time later. As I don't have ups I had powered down my tower. The next time I powered up the breaker in the power supply tripped and when I reset it and booted, my 1.5v agp video card was toasted, at least I hope its the card and not elsewhere on the bus.
Changing the frequency of the power grid is VERY hard. Dropping the voltage (which is a brownout) is easy. So no way did yo udrop to 50 Hz. A few years ago a mejor mess in europe caused the grid there to split into 3 parts, running at 48, 50 and 52Hz respectively, due to severe imbalance in the network, and the frequencies could only be different because the grid completely split. So to drop the frequency to 50Hz in Toronto would require changing the frequency of a very large part of the grid in north america. Not going to happen.
So that's not so bad, there's no enterprise stuff at risk, I just hack together another box and carry on. However, now I have a real problem and I'm in need of a solution. Yesterday I fired up the WiFi while my SO was drying her hair. I toasted her salon quality hair dryer. Not good. :-( There is no gfi outlet and at this point I'm wondering if I need UPS, for the hair dryer, if not the computer.
Unless your area has serious transformer issues, you should not have voltage swings that could damage a hair druer.
So my question is, does anyone on this list have similar problems and a low cost hack they have used to deal with Toronto's iffy grid.
-- Len Sorensen