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Default Reasons for devices failing throughout the house

Arfa Daily wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi,

I have no experience of this sort of thing, so excuse the naivety of my
question... In the course of the last few days, our house has
experienced at least six electrical items failing. This includes a
network router and a set of speakers, both of which stopped working
sometime during Sunday night. Countless other devices have failed since
then, including a Sky+ satellite box, an electric fly catcher, a wall
heater... I know all this could just be bad luck and we're seeing a
pattern where there isn't one, but could there be anything that could
have caused these apparently unrelated faults? We use surge protectors
to protect our computers, yet the speakers and network router failed at
some point in the middle of the night.

Again, apologies if this sounds naive but I'd like to know if I'm just
being paranoid before I call an engineer in to chase these ghosts...
:-)

TIA,

Jerry.


Do you by any chance live in a village with old overhead PMR mains supply ?
Just a thought as a friend of mine suffered a virtually identical problem to
this, which ultimately turned out to be an intermittent neutral connection,
as someone else has suggested, back at the pole mounted transformer. This
was apparently resulting in the mains intermittently shooting up to
phase-phase voltage of 440v. I'm not sufficiently au fait with how power
distribution networks work, to tell you exactly how this occurs, but when
the electricity board came out and sorted this problem, the multiple
equipment failures stopped.

Arfa


AFAIK nothing like that, Arfa. Like Graham said, I'm in the UK.
Medium-sized town. Nothing out of the ordinary. This might sound really
dumb, but I wondered if a spike could get around surge protectors, via
something like a cable modem...