Game consoles, surge protectors, & house fires in action
About 02:00 one night we hear a faint thud outside and the electric goes off. Didn't know it at the time but a tree had fallen across the road about 1/4 mile from my house and when it fell it took the electric lines with it. Around 05:00 the electric comes back on and is followed by everything in the house beeping, clicking, and powering on like it normally does if the electric goes out. Within seconds everything starts going apeshit; some things like the telephone & printer rapidly turn on and off, fans start running a thousand miles an hour, and I hear some pops which I found out afterwards were light bulbs in one room exploding. Wife gets up to turn her printer off since everything keeps flickering. When she walks upstairs she yells out that she smells smoke. I run up and the smell of burnt plastic is waifing through the upstairs along with that dark smoke that accompanies burning plastic. I grab a flashlight and find two surge protectors on fire, quickly yank all the plugs in them out, pull them them out of the wall and throw them outside.
Next was about 45 minutes of me running around the house like a chicken with my head cut off trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Some lights work, some don't, an outlet would have the top plug work fine and the bottom one be dead. There's no rhyme or reason to it and I can't tell if anything is legitimately messed up or if the plugin just isn't working. Wife calls the electric company and they say flip the main breaker to leave everything off until they call us back.
Come to find out the repair guys made a serious mistake. After they repaired the power line they just glanced up the road towards my way, saw houses lit up and the security lights on the poles, and assumed everything was alright. What they didn't know was that when the tree took the power lines down it also jerked the ground cable loose that runs from the transformer to my house: all I had running into the house was the hot wire. This caused everything that was 220v in the house to backfeed into the wiring; essentially instead of one wire being 110v and the other ground, now neither is ground and both wires are hot with voltage spikes anywhere from 0 to 300v+.
Anything that was 220v was alright and most appliances made it out OK, but pretty much anything in the house that ran off of DC power and wasn't hooked to a surge protector was instantly fried. That goes for little things like clocks & phones to costly items like the basement dehumidifier and the power board to the propane furnace. Every surge protector in the house was fried. Keep in mind this wasn't an amperage spike but a voltage spike, and nothing ever ground itself out, so never at any point did the circuit breakers in the fuse box trip.
House insurance would cover it but it had a $1000 deductible (plus a rate hike since you're making a claim) and the way I figured it the cost to replace everything that was fried was less than $2000, so making an insurance claim wasn't an option. The power company basically said "Oops, our bad. Tough shit." You know how surge protectors have these outlandish $100,000 property guarantees? You can take that and wipe your ass with it. After it was all said and done I managed to find replacement parts and fix almost everything myself (that was able to be repaired) with the exception of the dehumidifier, which was the most expensive single item clocking in at around $300. 300 bucks isn't anything to sneeze at but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a new refrigerator, or heat pump, or a whole new house since luckily we were home at the time. If we hadn't been there's not a doubt in my mind this thing would have burnt to the ground.
Anyway, here's a rundown on the surge protectors. Keep in mind all were rendered useless after the ordeal.
Monster brand home-theater type protector - Not sure of the exact model on this one or where I got it, it was light purple/dark blue and was a few years old. Each plug had a separate color and a label under it to easily identify components (TV, VCR, Cable Box, etc). Had this one in the living room with the most expensive stuff plugged into it and it totally did it's job. When I went to replace it I saw a lot of the Monster brand protectors have a sticker that says "fireproof ceramic" on them and believe me that's something to look for. Since the exterior is ceramic and not plastic it won't melt when it overheats.
HP brand home-theater type - This one was very dark blue with gray plug covers with coax (and possibly either LAN or telephone plugs too, I can't remember). Bought it on clearance at Wal-Mart at least 8 years ago, even marked down it was still around $30 bucks so it was a modestly priced thing at the time. I had it fully pegged out with every socket filled up with a CRT TV and a ton of retro consoles. Protected everything and nothing hooked to it was messed up.
RCA 3x2 "swivel" type protector - Originally marketed years ago as an "as seen on TV" type thing, this is a white plastic square that mounts flush with the wall and is designed as a space saver type thing where it can be mounted behind a bookshelf or whatever. It's got 2 columns of 3 plugins on the left and right that can be rotated so they point to the side rather than straight out. This one still worked afterwards but I threw it out because neither the "protected" nor "grounded" LEDs lit up anymore, so I assumed the worst. This one was about half and half, some things plugged into it were unharmed (Retron5, Pioneer stereo tuner) but it fried the original Xbox and the AC adapter plug for a small Xbox LCD screen. On the Xbox it just fried the AC board, so I was able to swap out a replacement on it easily.
Cyberpower "eco-friendly" black and green protector - This one was black with green caps over the plugs. It was designed as a power saving thing where it had a master plug and some slave plugs that would only get power if the item hooked to the master plug was powered on. Also had two plugs on the end that were always on. I had this hooked up in the den with the TV hooked to the master plug so the rest of the stuff didn't get power unless the TV was on. Pretty much everything hooked to this was burnt up. Fried the power supplies on my Xbox 360 & Wii, internal AC board on an Xbox, blew the internal fuse on a DVD-R/VCR combo, and worst of all fried my dear old hulking 52' Mitsubishi rear-projection HDTV (which cost over 2 grand back in '02). Luckily I had worked on it a few years ago and knew my way around it so I was able to take just the power board out to the TV repairman and have him replace some capacitors and other parts in it. One thing of note; on the original Xbox's fried AC board the bridge rectifier was obliterated and one thumb size capacitor had swelled to the point of bursting, coating that half of the console with a nice film. The spot directly above that cap on the top shell of the console had some melting of the plastic (which is fairly thick) so I'd say if that thing hadn't burst (cutting the power) it would have either caught fire or started smoldering from the inside of the console.
Philips Power Sentry brand protector - Rounding up the pack are the two fuckers that quite literally caught fire within seconds of the power spike. These were around $30 at Wal-Mart, don't remember the joules rating but it was fairly high, and were specifically marketed as either office or entertainment center use. Bought probably 3 years ago. These came from the hardware section but I remember at the time they had the same exact surge protector in the electronics section only it was black and gray instead of white (but it was 100% the same exact thing). On a positive note I can say they did protect everything plugged into them. One I had my desktop PC, printers, and all other computer stuff plugged into. The other had several game consoles and a small flatscreen TV hooked to it. However as you can see from these pictures they both caught fire in the same exact spot, so obviously all these models have a meltdown on that one component. If you're using one of these toss it out now! Saving a desktop computer or retro consoles a bit less important than your family dying from carbon monoxide inhalation.
Close up of where the heat starts at, whatever component that dissipates the heat isn't designed too fucking good.
Underside shot. The one that was in the worst shape also burnt four square holes into the carpet where the feet got so hot it melted the fibers.
Burn damage to the carpet and wall under my desk where the PC was located. This was after wiping the soot off; the black isn't soot, it's scorched into the wood/carpet/sheetrock.
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Originally Posted by Daltone
Mario says "... if you do drugs, you go to hell before you die."