Any Sparkies on here - question

[ellis]

Well, what a 24 hours. Last night at our office space, the place had a power surge which took out a couple of computers but mine was OK. My mate lost his iMac bit has managed to save the hard drive.

 

Then, this morning, everything is back on and it surges again. This time it fried my iMac! Again, hard drive and RAM recoverable but machine is caput. The thing is, all my gear is plugged into a surge protected tower as was my mates.

 

It's a pretty isolated surge too as not all of the office was affected just one small area.

 

My questions to the knowledgeable sparkies are: why didn't the surge trip a main fuse? Why did the surge protectors not do their job? Any ideas as to what this could have been?

[pedrosixfour]

Check and see who made the surge protector.

 

A tenner says whoever it was they are owned by Apple.

[Scott]

Wrong fuse, faulty fuse and the surge protector sounds like it isn't up to the task. Do the surge protectors protect against voltge spikes as well as current surges?

 

Bit of bad luck there to say the least. Normally the power pack on your PC will save you too.

[ellis]

Mystery solved. Sparkies went in the 'power' room on the outside of the building and some typical thievin-pikey-scum-suckin-lowlife-dolescroungin-ne'er do well has stripped out all the earth wire for the copper. Should have tried the live you tw@t! That's cost my mate and I £1300 a piece today for new machines.

[kjgreen3]

Unlucky, pikey chav scum are like rats though. They never seem to chew (cut off) any of the live cables. Seem to sense the current and steer clear. Could have been dangerous as if anyone had got a shock none of the breakers and most of the rcd's wouldn't have tripped so its good that the fault was found and hopefully promptly rectified.

 

For safetys sake, until the main earths, cpc's have been re-instated it isn't wise to continue using the electrics in the affected offices etc due to un-earthed equipment and structural steel containing floating voltages and hence a possible shock hazard.

 

Although as a sparky im not massively clued up on surge protection but I imagine they would need a working earth to send the 'surge' to otherwise if the voltage spike got too high it would bypass the protector and onto the equipment, hence the damage.

 

Simple example your laptop maybe 12V Direct current working off 230V Alternating suplly via a transformer. It's roughly a 20:1 ratio. Lets say a voltage spike of 1000V happened for a fair few milleseconds, thats approximately 50V fed to all your laptops juicy internals (Or in reality ~4x the rated voltage sent to the motherboard and cpu etc). Even though it happened for a fraction of a second its enough to cause all that damage.

 

Hope you get everything reinstated and also that the electric plant room sees a serious security upgrade and maybe quick daily visual checks by competent onsite maintenance electricians.

[Shadow Beast]

Mystery solved. Sparkies went in the 'power' room on the outside of the building and some typical thievin-pikey-scum-suckin-lowlife-dolescroungin-ne'er do well has stripped out all the earth wire for the copper. Should have tried the live you tw@t! That's cost my mate and I £1300 a piece today for new machines.

 

 

some surge protectors have insurance on them up to a certain value, couple of thousand in some cases, might be worth a look to see if your is, maybe make a claim?

 

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/9823116/c_1/1|category_root|Garden+and+DIY|14418702/c_2/3|15701048|Electrical+accessories|14418903/c_3/4|cat_14418903|Leads+and+sockets|14418910.htm?_$ja=tsid:11527|cc:|prd:9823116|cat:garden+%26+diy+%3E+electrical+accessories+%3E+leads+and+sockets

 

3k cover for this one. prob not a lot of use now though, maybe for future.