Electricity Surge

ddraver

Anyone ever had an electricity surge before?

Some doofus of an electrician caused a significant one in our flat. In your experiences, what are the chances of things coming back from the death after you ve replaced the fuses?

It's a bit important for me becasue I'm moving at the end of the month and there's no point paying to move stuff that's now junk (e.g the fridge freezer!)

Thanks
David

sungod

how did he manage that? i'd think to blow stuff he'd need to be very silly with three phase - years ago one of our guys fried all the power supplies in a mainframe doing that, hilarious, less funny if it's your stuff though

best is just try things and see, if the fuse goes again then it's repair/replace time

ddraver

Well we have a restaurant downstairs on a separate circuit (apparently) that did nt have enough voltage so he came to increase it. Somehow he's obviously managed to screw ours up as well so when he turned everything in the upstairs apartments back on.....

Most things seemed to have survived but everything with a transformer is not working (eg laptop chargers, phone chargers etc, computer speaker systems). However if you replace the power lead and the transformer things seem to be ok. All the apple products have gone for example... but of course they re all different and a new box is 40Euros a shot with no guarantee of success...I'm hoping the electrician might have something with which he can test them all...

The most annoying ting is the fridge has also gone but that has a UK plug which DIDNT fuse....

sungod

modern stuff with a power brick usually has auto voltage switching to support usa and continental voltages, they use switchmode rather than simple line transformers, excessive voltage usually fries the input side of power brick so the connected devices will usually survive, depends on how the brick fails though

stuff with ye olde 50/60hz transformer may survive if the fuse blows fast enough, otherwise it can be badly damaged as the transformer will simply pass on a proportionately increased voltage to the subsequent circuits, which in consumer products usually have little or no over voltage protection

direct driven things like fridge/freezer compressors can burn out, but often they have a thermal fuse that may be replaceable, it's worth checking for your specific model, perhaps you can just replace the tf and it'll be ok

ddraver

Thanks, that sounds promising. The other people in the building are adamant that the restaurant or the landlord have to replace our broken stuff (and by comparison we got off lightly) so hopefully all should be sorted. The trouble is that in my experience, getting money out of Dutch people is not a fun task...and it's f**king cold and there's no hot water!!