Pete C. wrote:
Smarty wrote:

Power outages and restores can create switching transients with peak-to-peak
voltages vastly greater than the RMS voltage nominally supplied by the
utility. Motors and other inductive loads have huge inrush currents at
start-up, and many electronic devices are unable to deal with these surges.
I have lost a number of unprotected devices.

"Movistors", "Transorbs", and back to back zener diodes are typically used
in this application to clamp the transients. And there once was a time when
power companies took some responsibility for the quality of the power they
delivered. Alas, this no longer seems to be the case.


The power companies level of responsibility and willingness to take
responsibility varies greatly by utility, state and circumstances of the
event.

I've seen a case where the utility covered the cost of repair of a
stereo and VCR that were damaged when the utility lost a neutral
connection at the pole.

Another case a utility readily covered damages to some computer
equipment that was damaged by an event that was likely a misconnected
tap during the replacement of a failed distribution transformer.
Amazingly enough after tripping nearly every breaker in the entire data
center, the only damage was to one small router and one small network
switch.

Most utilities do take the quality of the power they supply seriously
and if presented with a reasonable claim that is supported by relevant
data indicating it resulted from the utilities negligence in some way
they will usually accept the claim without issues.

The thing to remember is that not everything is the utilities fault. A
failure of their equipment would be, but they can hardly be held
responsible for the results of a lightning strike or a car crash into a
pole (though the at fault driver might be held responsible).

Pete C.

A few years back up in southeast CT, a storm caused a hightension wire
to drop onto the 110(/220) line. Power company paid off all the claims,
there were a lot of them.

Me, way back when, just finished assembling my wonderful brand
spanking new Heathkit color Tv and was going through the alignment
when the power went out. Guess who neglected to turn the TV off before
power came back on. That's when I learned that power-on is often
accompanied by a transient. I didn't try to file a claim, though.