Thursday, October 30, 2008

Power issues

JPS is messing with me. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that food came out of my microwave and it was still cold, my fridge guard was chipping out and the fuses started to blow in my speaker set. I found all this strange until one day I came home to my hot apartment to turn on the fan and it was barely spinning. I ran for my multimeter and it gave me 80 to 90v and it all started to make sense.

Since I am all about going green the term brown out has mostly lost its meaning since the florescent lights are either on or off and they don't get brown under a low voltage supply like I had been receiving. It still left the mystery as to why the 3amp fuses in my speakers where blowing but one day last weekend I plugged in my multimeter and caught jps giving me power at 150v sustained.

As far as I am concerned my supply voltage should be 115v +/-5v and anything else is unacceptable. 80 to 150v a deviation of 35v is enough to destroy anything worth having and that's what JPS has started to do. When the voltage got too low my DSL modem would drop out and I would lose internet service. On the flip side when the power was at 150v the 15v, 1amp, linear power supply primary coil burnt out.

Pretty much anything with an unfused coil facing jps faced certain doom as a second set of speakers in my bedroom died as well. That was the last straw, I took it apart as pictured to the left and cut off the dead transformer and fed the amplifier circuit with a rectified power supply I built 13 years ago(I'm so proud). This one has a significantly larger primary coil so it should withstand any further surges until I can find a suitably rated switched mode power supply for it as I have already done for my DSL modem. FYI if anybody actually read this far I majored in electronics for my undergrad degree.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

>> FYI if anybody actually read this far
>> I majored in electronics for my
>> undergrad degree.

I see. So have you called them to complain?

Tami said...

NERD!
But thanks for the info.
Report your findings to Bureau of Standards and then call a talk show and talk about it.

Pepper said...

so
uhm
yeah

Crankyputz said...

I sorta skimmed.....

Unknown said...

80 to 150V, JPS is certainly on a mission to destroy your appliances and electronics! Such is life under a monopoly as eveil as JPS.

Dee said...

yeah
I skimmed too
good luck
maybe they need to hire you to help them understand what it is that customers are paying for and what they need to deliver