What the HELL is going on here?

Posted by: Tim Danaher on 19 September 2002

Fist off, please bear with me and let me say that Western Power are a bunch of tossers. We've had surges, brownouts and general mains oddness for the last three weeks, culminating yesterday in a total failure for eight hours. I'm assuming this wasn't a surge (none of the fuses / RCBOs tripped).

The fault happened while I had popped out for twenty minutes -- came back in and my Isobariks were making a loud, low, intermittent buzzing that hopped around between channels. Looked at my system -- It was completely dead: no power coming into the house, after all. As a precaution, I turned off the NAP 250s / 135s. The buzzing stopped. As a test, I pressed the switches on the power amps again -- the buzzing came back.

Now all this was happening with NO POWER whatsoever. I know that capacitors continue to discharge after power down, but do so in a continual (exponential?) fashion. This buzzing was completely random.

Everything works fine this morning, but what the HELL was going on?

Or are me caps just shagged?

Cheers,

Tim

Os nid Campagnolo yw hi, dyw hi ddim yn werth ei marcho...

Posted on: 19 September 2002 by Martin Payne

Tim,

maybe you were just getting a very low voltage.

Presumably we can eliminate some weird fault with a large difference between neutral & earth if you have an RCD in your fuse box.

cheers, Martin

Posted on: 19 September 2002 by Paul Ranson

The power switch is between the mains and the transformer, the caps are between the transformer and the amps, so the buzzing was induced by something on the mains.

So it was probably a very low input voltage, so the regulators were getting a bit unhappy.

Paul

Posted on: 19 September 2002 by J.N.

It was a political comment about George 'dubya'.

Then I got to the next sentence.