wrote in message
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Arfa Daily wrote:
wrote in message
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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...

Yes, this was in the UK too - hence the 440v phase-phase. Many villages
still have overhead distribution PME systems in use, which is why I was
querying the point. Pole mounted transformers are not the exclusive preserve
of power distribution in the US. Until a couple of years back, when it was
finally put underground, the farm behind me was fed from an 11kV pole
mounted transformer at the bottom of my neighbour's garden. Another poster
further up the thread, has explained exactly how the neutral problem can
occur, even with modern underground and substations, so it's still quite
possible that this is the cause of your problem.

Arfa