Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not The working week has rolled around again, bringing with it the promise of new achievements – and the chance to mess things up in ways that we cover here in "Who, Me?" The Register's reader-contributed column in which you admit to your failures. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Arsène" who told us about the time he …
I was "gifted" one of those as part payment for some website work around 2004. I tried updating the Solaris install to the latest version and found it ran like treacle. So, I ended up trying out Gentoo Linux on it as, at the time, that was one of the few distros that would run on Sparc. After several false starts, I managed to get it running as a LAMP server which helped in my embryonic, self-employed website building business.
From what I understand, for that application you should use X2 capacitors on the mains side that should be rated to at least the peak value of the voltage, which will be ~1.4 times the RMS voltage value (which is what we see with the mains voltage).
So for 220V, it should be rated to at least 310V. For Japan on 110V, then a lower value would suffice.
In the UK. I' pretty sure I see capacitors rated to 450V as the mains side noise suppressors, to give a bit more headroom.
We don't do that anymore. It's too expensive, plus our bright young engineers don't have the expertise to predict what might happen if a capacitor is blown.
In my experience, if your electronic thingamajig gives you a puff of smoke, it's done.
And forget repairing. We've lost that as well.
Ah, progress . . .
When it's brown, it's cooked. When it's black and smoking†, it's buggered...
Taken in a different domain of interpretation not exactly PC but nonetheless not too far from the truth.
Third electrical case is when the components is supplied with a voltage a couple of orders magnitude outside spec which causes the "surprised" component to fly off the circuit board at something approaching escape velocity due the instantaneous vaporization of its leads.
Having prised such a tortured component from the case's lid I was a little surprised that it was still functional if amputated.
† depends on what it's been smoking I imagine.
When I was young I worked in an electronics factory on Quality Control, inspecting and testing finished circuit boards one of the fun things we did was to unsolder a certain electrolytic capacitor, scrape off the red blob on the casing that identified the positive terminal, use a red varnish pen to make a blob by the negative terminal, and solder it back on the board, reversed. Then slip it into a colleague's queue of boards to be checked. The drill was, first inspect for wrongly placed or missing components, then put the board on a test jig and apply power. Usually the cap would let go after a minute or so with a loud POP and a cloud of smoke, but one made a sound like a pistol shot and flung its innards about 20 feet. Very stupid, almost certainly gross misconduct, mostly tolerated by the management, but if someone had lost an eye then ther perp might be for the high jump (if they could be identified; the whole prank idea arose because an example of that capacitor was supplied to us wrongly marked). It was interesting to see the 'Swiss roll' interior of an electrolytic capacitor all unfurled.
"It was interesting to see the 'Swiss roll' interior of an electrolytic capacitor all unfurled."
Many moons ago I connected the cathode bypass capacitor the wrong way round on an amplifier I was building. There was a pop and the room looked like it was experiencing a snowstorm for the next 5 minutes.
A bit like rice krispie cake I thought....
We had a Physics teacher who ran an after school electronics club who decided to teach us what happens when you wire up an electrolytic backwards. It took several minutes of reverse over-voltage before it agreed to let go with a loud pop and a few bits of shrapnel. We had all been made to hide under the lab benches just in case.
I used to run robot building days in schools, the mornings of which were spent soldering the circuits boards together. I remember one physics teacher who got very twitchy when I told his sixth formers that a reverse-wired tantalum bead capacitor made a popular improvised detonator in terrorist circles.
When I was in high school, I used to wire up random components on a "suicide cord" (basically a plug terminating in bare wires), plug them into the wall socket, and enjoy the fireworks.
Yes, remarkably, I have all my fingers, toes, eyes, etc. I never even burned the house down, though I think I blew a few fuses (this was in an era before breaker panels were standard).
Youth and stupidity are a strong and dangerous combination.
In my first "proper" job, I had been changing some PP3s in items of test equipment.
Finding a couple that were utterly flat, and barely raised a tickle on the tongue-test*, just for the "art" of it, I plugged them together to make a kind of monolith on my desk.
Ten minutes later as I was in the middle of something else entirely, there was the most almighty <bang>. The batteries didn't fly too far, but that day I discovered that PP3s are constructed from six smaller cells in series. The one which had exploded had six clear plastic cells stacked one on top of the other containing a liquid-soaked fibrous material, some of which was now on my desk, the one which hadn't (but which I opened up to see), had six cylindrical cells (like AAA batteries but a lot skinnier) stacked next to each other.
M.
*of course, while the tongue-test is great for 6V (e.g. PJ996) and 7.2/8.4/9V batteries (e.g. rechargeable and primary PP3s), it's not so good for 1.5V batteries which "barely raise a tickle". In other words, the fact that I felt anything at all from these PP3s should have warned me that there was some power left...
One late '80s switched mode PSU, in a computer, had an internal cable that could be plugged in either way around (it had symmetrical colours on the cabling as well so no hints as to which way was which; you just had to be careful).
One way everything was great, the other you got two bigish electrolytics pretending to be shotgun shells and filling the room with their guts.
How do I know? well the hardware engineers were repairing said PSU and, for whatever reason, got the cable the wrong way around. BIg badaboom. Us software chapies rush next door to see what is happening and, once the HW chaps got their hearing back, they explained. Much mirth.
/me waves to anyone who was there... good times apart from the light and variableness of the cashflow!
Back in the 90s I worked in an electronics lab (well, a couple of brick rooms). We built and repaired custom electrical and electronic systems (think custom control systems for industrial systems).
We had a bad batch of electrolytic capacitors at one point, and they would randomly pop during burn in testing!
We ended up making a case and lid for the test bench, to literally keep the lid on.
Technician thought he had broken the test rig because there were no signs of power. Unplugged the board being tested and checked: nope, the test rig was fine. Connected everything back up, and still seems like no power.
After sitting back and thoughtfully stroking his chin the top of the line driver that was plugged in backwards audibly ricocheted off the 30 foot (9 meter) ceiling. Then the lights all came back on the test rig.
He said he hadn't missed getting an electronic caste mark by more than a couple of seconds.
And things were repairable largely because manufacturing was basic. If I look inside my Quad amplifier from the early 1980s, it's all visible, accessible, spaciously laid out, and almost every component is identifiable and pretty standard. If I knew what I was doing (which I don't) then any component could be replaced. But the reason it was like that was because it was made essentially by hand. These days components are smaller, circuit boards are far denser and generally assembled by machine, there's more custom components, and a lot more thought into making things more compact because people want things smaller and cheaper, and or they want more functionality. Compare my Quad to a modern Sony amplifier, and the internals of the Sony are more like a computer, with large ICs machine soldered to the boards, often multiple boards sandwiched on top of each other, miniaturised components everywhere.
In real terms, stuff has become cheaper and for the most part more capable. To go back to the hoped for nirvana of repairable kit would mean winding back the clock on manufacturing and up front costs rising significantly - and still most stuff wouldn't be repaired.
"and a lot more thought into making things more compact because people want things smaller and cheaper,"
Cheaper, yes. Smaller? Not really. Some of the big chunky receivers could have been made smaller, but they looked awesome with big meters and dials and controls on them. I don't want a paper thin laptop. I'm fine with one that's 2cm thick and has enough battery to play 4k pron all day long. Or cat videos. Whatever. I'm I sharing too much?
You're 1980's Quad amplifier probably needs the capacitors replacing. I don't know how good the capacitors Quad originally used were, although for the price, they ought to have been pretty good.
I've done a couple of NAD amps for my own use (and yes, I know these were built down to a price), and yes, all the components can be changed, but be careful of lifting the board tracks.
Even though the amps worked, looking at the board there was evidence of capacitor leakage all over the place (and no, I'm not looking at a silastic potting compound). And unlike modern electrolytic capacitors that have deliberate scored weaknesses in the end of the can to blow out to prevent explosion, these were leaking around the legs all over the board!
Yes, but that was back in the days when senior management only paid themselves tens of times as much as normal employees.
Once senior management decided they needed to pay themselves hundreds of times as much as normal employees to set themselves apart, that's when the rot set in.
Prospering is no longer considered acceptable though.In the last few decades it's become the expectation that companies will maximise (short term) profitability to keep the share value high, trigger executive bonuses and ensure that the venture capitalist investors are happy
"thus engineers were instructed to build in predetermined breaking points"
It seems we're back to the bad old days of the 1970s. Back then you could buy a fridge and the freezer compartment door would be just about well enough engineered to outlast delivery to the customer. Oddly enough I have a freezer built to those standards today. The only difference now is that you can order spares off the internet.
The freezer door latch on my mum's Westinghouse refrigerator lasted until I was in college. (I, and the refrigerator, are the same age.) When we couldn't get replacement parts, my mum had the repairman attach a magnetic cupboard door latch. That lasted until mum died, and possibly beyond. We had no other troubles with the 'fridge.
A refrigerator was one of the first purchases my parents made after they bought their first house in 1962. It was still working when we cleared out my late mother's flat in 2006. Similarly when I bought my first house around 1984 the fridge-freezer lasted into the 2000s. Since then, on the other hand, I seem to get through them at about seven year intervals. They don't make them like they used to.
No, they don't
Recently had the compressor motor fail. New fridge time, I thought. But it turns out, the compressor motor was fine. They are now 3 phase motors (more efficient) and it was the 3 phase driver PCB that had gone. They all use the same PCB, $150 on eBay. I discovered this after paying $500 for the guy to comemout and replace it. Considering how much time he spent underneath the thing, I think it was fair. Plus, I learned something. Refrig still running fine a year later. I suspect it was a transient on the power line due to a lightning strike or a car hitting a pole.
I have my late mother's fridge stored in the garage. Had to drag it into the kitchen for a couple of weeks recently when the 10 year old fridge freezer died suddenly & completely.
My mums fridge is a Prestcold, (manufactured by The Pressed Steel Company, one of those names that implies solid, traditional build) & was bought new in 1956/7 & which was in continuous use until her death in 2021. It looks a bit scabby but I can't bring myself to bin it. Anything that reliable deserves not to have its life cut artificially short. Beginning to worry now about how to make sure it still has a home after I'm gone...
"The penny pushers have figured out building things to survive is bad for business because it stops replacement sales"
Yes, but, replacements are only available for about 6 months after the thing has be EOL'd. I've got several small appliances where the selector switch has broken and nobody has them anymore. The problem is that the devices are built to last at least as long as the warranty plus a little margin so there's no point in having spares for sale during that time.
No -- our bright, young engineers absolutely have the expertise to predict what might happen if a capacitor is blown. It's part of an FMEA -- Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, an integral part of the engineering process.
It's the beancounters who ruined everything, by insisting to cut every possible corner. An engineer almost certainly designed the product to be better than what was eventually offered for sale, but was not allowed to implement it in full because someone in a senior management position needed a new set of tyres for one of their cars.
An engineer almost certainly designed the product to be better than what was eventually offered for sale
Look at the PCB in cheap Chinese wall-wart supplies. You'll almost certainly find the holes & silkscreen markings for the interference-suppression components, but no such components fitted. After all, they don't affect normal operation and are 'only' required for the certification process, leaving them out for production saves a significant number of pennies (or fen I suppose) on each unit. Never mind that they can screw up radio for all the neighbours...
holes & silkscreen markings for the interference-suppression components, but no such components fitted
Which takes me back to the story about the original batch of Raspberry Pi from China. They failed EMC testing because someone at the factory took it upon themselves to swap the ethernet connector "with magnetics" for one without, presumably cheaper to purchase and therefore increased margin on manufacture, though the Pi people were very circumspect in their non-allocation of blame.
M.
> It's the beancounters who ruined everything, by insisting to cut every possible corner.
Its not a new thing either. Going back to the 1990's we had some touch control table lamps, one came from John Lewis and 2 other identical but cheaper ones from ASDA (stop laughing at the back there).
The JL one is still going but the ASDA ones fried the triac inside them each time a bulb failed as it was specced right on the edge whilst the JL one was over engineering but cost more. Got quite proficient at replacing the blown devices with uprated ones.
Same with some Beko washing machines. They have 1A Schottky diode in the PSU that is constantly carrying just under 1A. After a while it cooks and dies O/C, doing no other damage but the PSU won't start. Simple solution is to replace it with a 2A one, cost about 50p + some solder, but I would guess that many of those machines are now lying in tips, unnecessarily.
I can top that, I reckon.
I had a really nice little camera, back in the early 80s. I'd had it about two years.
Dad took it on holiday and broke it, no big deal. He paid for a new one. The only place that still sold them was Dixons- badged with their name, but apparently the same.
It never worked properly ( didn't tell dad, he'd have been heart broken). But the film wouldn't wind on properly, it just slipped and moved on half a frame. On looking inside it, what the bastards had done was replace the thin metal gear that moved the film for a nasty plastic and slightly thicker one- which the film just slid over.
Quite a number of German-engineered, decidedly not cheap, HomeMatic wireless actors (for blinds, lights, dimers etc.) have under-specced capacitors. It's a known bug and I became quite good at replacing these electrolytics with better ones (higher voltage and temperature rating); they're 17 cents each retail. The actuators cost around 40 Euros.
It's not just a single model but multiple, and the problem is known for years. I'm not sure if the successors (Homematic IP) have the same issue as for new additions to my home control I prefer Zigbee components (better radio range due to the mesh routing).
Depends what sort of systems you're designing - in the world of commercial/industrial electronics, where stuff might be expected to keep on working for a decade or more with little or no maintenance, there's still a fair bit of emphasis placed on trying to predict ways in which things could break and designing ways to mitigate against them. And that's on top of any of the fault protection stuff we HAVE to design into the products in order to simply achieve compliance with whatever standards are applicable.
Naim Audio (UK based hifi manufacturer) build a mix of relatively high volume production line audio - Muso, Unity, Nova - and primarily hand built black box gear - pre-amps, power amps, PSUs, streamers. Their claim is that they will service any bit of equipment that they’ve sold since they began in 1973, and recommend the low volume black box gear is serviced every ~10 years. Servicing is usually replacing caps and updating other items that have a shelf life.
And on a different tack Mend It Mark on YT does a sterling job of coaxing failed electronic gear back to life by methodically tracing faults and replacing failed components. Definitely a YT rabbit hole worth disappearing down.
Mend-it Mark is a repair genius. Also check out his "banned" video which resulted in a copyright strike because he had the temerity to accurately describe the innards of a £25k amplifier as no better than a student project,
I've told this story before, but back in 2012 whilst working on a Fruit Store opening in Germany, we learned the hard way that TVs designed for the US market don't routinely come with universal power supplies. A step-down transformer had been shipped with the TV but was missed out. I was impressed that the TV lasted several hours before failing. I don't remember it going bang either.
We had an identical TV couriered from another Fruit Store on the other side of the country to ensure we had the complete window display working for opening day.
Oh yes, Naim will service anything they made.
Except The AV1
The tuners
The older CD players
The multi-room stuff
The older streamers
The amps were very easily serviceable. But who put the 40v capacitors in the XPS which killed them if your mains was slightly above 240v but within tolerance for 230v? If you were lucky they just dried out and stopped your CD player working. If unlucky they unloaded the electrolyte everywhere. And stopped your CD player working.
The amp needing servicing every 10 years was the 250 because another cap choice, the 10p axial on its power supply board would go high ESR and turn it into an RF oscillator.
I miss servicing these.
My understanding is that PSUs & power amps are the bigger beneficiaries of a good service as caps tend to dry out over time causing a gradual degradation in sound, and when they come back with renewed internals they sound like new. I don’t know, never owned any of their kit long enough to need a service but instead have chopped boxes in as p/x during a steady upgrade process. Ask me in 2018 when my amp becomes due.
The underlying point using Naim as an example is that cutting corners to encourage component failure might be an attractive business model in some cases; in this case going the other way gives owners a little bit of security buying their black boxes knowing that they have a good 10 years' use in them and beyond that can effectively be renewed so it’s either a sound long-term purchase, or builds in decent residual values.
Anyway. Speaking of hand-built - I recently lost my job building custom hand-made clocks. I’m gutted, especially considering all the extra hours I put in.
(c) Mr Keaveny on his CGR show the other week :)
In the late 90s, I supported a certain large metro system. One Easter, a large Power Event took out lots of kit. Being the customer's own power supply, the resulting repairs were officially "User Error", and so did not have to hit the SLA.
I headed out 20 miles to a site where the PSU for the network kit had died. I ordered a fresh one to be couriered in an sat down to twiddle my thumbs.
"What about the print server?" someone asked. Without a network it stood no chance of working, but I took a look anyway. It was dead. These things normally had an external power supply. Surprisingly it was not the usual welded-shut type, but had a screw at each corner. I opened it up and it revealed a glass cartridge fuse. The wire inside had not just melted. The inside of the glass was a mirror. I visited their stores and found an exact replacement. The box powered up! The only time the fuse blew so as to protect the equipment I've ever seen.
In the 1990s we had one of the first HP/UX machines in Europe at work.
It had a smart auto-switching power supply so no need to worry about 110V/220V/240V settings.
Work was a country house in a village, taking a lot of power, being full of computers and industrial printers, and often suffered brownouts and power cuts; after a cut the IT guys walked round turning things back on nice and slowly so as not to make a surge - 5" rotating disc storage for one thing.
Every brownout, the HP/UX machine went pop: it happily switched to 110V mode from 240, but was far too slow at switching back to 240V mode....
Eventually they sent the machine back with a boring fixed voltage PSU and all was happy....
Ugh, I detested those things when I was at uni - all the other Unix-based systems we had ran about as reliably as you'd expect from a Unix-based system, whereas those HP/UX boxes seemed to want to lock-up if you so much as looked at them funny. And don't get me started on the ergonomic disaster that passed for their mouse - now I think about it, perhaps the instability of the OS makes sense, in that it protected you from being able to spend too much time suffering the effects of the mouse before being forced into taking a much needed break...
Many years ago the power was off to my village for an extended period and National Grid set up a generator to provide us with power for a few weeks. For some reason it was running at 60Hz instead of 50Hz. The only problem I encountered was the clock on the VHS machine (for this was, as I say, many years ago) started to run fast as it must have been driven by mains frequency.
If I wanted to program the timer to record something while I was out I had to do some maths to work out what time the clock would be showing at the start and end of the show so I could set the timer accordingly.
When I was in university, the uni ran our dorm off of a generator for a couple days. (Can't remember why.) My roommate's alarm clock went off, so we both stumbled out of bed, dog tired, and started getting ready for the day. Eventually noticed it was dark outside, and checked watches - the alarm clock didn't like running off a generator, and was running at double speed. It was 2 AM!
I may not be recalling this quite correctly but commercial US tape recorders imported & used in UK recording studios in 1960's had that or similar issue producing a wah-wah sound due to the windings in the motor coils set up for 60Hz, especially when transferring\playing back tapes on other devices.
Exploited by The Beatles IIRC in some of their studio work.
When I first got there in the 90's most appliances came in an East and a West version according to the frequency they were intended to work on. Lots of warnings on the box about how you'd cause a rift in the space-time continuum if you plugged it into the wrong kind of electricity....
Now in the era of inverter and VVVF drives I don't imagine there is much left that cares.
Well they say that... but a nominal 230v allows both 240v and 220v to be in spec. So UK mains tends to be 240-250v, and DE mains is generally 220v (though I just measured it at 236v).
Resistive devices: irons, kettles, cookers, and indeed soldering irons, are quite aware of the issue when you use a 240v part on 220v. The tea takes bloody ages.
Always pictured a euro-Sir Humphrey.
Minister: The council of Europe has decreed the same voltage across the EU. Thus will cost tres Grande-Euro!
Humphrey: Mais non monsieur minister. They only wish to harmonize. We just need to change the spec from 220+/-5V and 240+/-5 to a harmonious 220+25/-5
The Dreamcast was not worth the money to me as a new unit. In addition to the console cost, there was the subscription fee to use it online (it came with a modem). It had proprietary features, such as the GD-ROM, to ensure only officially-sanctioned programs were developed and released for it.
When it became trailing-edge, I picked one up for £20. It (at least the one I got) let you change the menus and game languages between Japanese and English. It was a kick to hear Kasumi in "Dead or Alive" exclaim, "Uruse nai wa!" ("I will never forgive you!")
Minor pedantry alert... the Japanese is "yurusenai"...
The English translation is close enough to "I can't forgive you", so that's cool. An alternative translation might be "intolerable!"
We once had an IBM terminal go pop first thing on a Monday morning, not a huge problem as we were generally moving over to emulation software on PCs so had spare terminals. We swapped the dead one out for a known good device, plugged it in, switched it on and it also went pop, this time accompanied by smoke!
At that point we stopped plugging terminals in and instructed the arriving staff to not turn anything on until we said so. The in-house electrician confirmed that instead of live and neutral on the sockets we had two phases hence the overvoltage supply. He blamed the ancient wiring in the factory but I wasn't entirely convinced they hadn't made a change over the weekend that caused the problem.
I worked in a building where the electricity board were working on the building's feed and managed to screw the phases, meaning that the normal 230v suddenly became 400v.
Luckily we were just round the corner from Edgware Rd and it's host of electronic parts shops. We must have cleaned them out of fuses, both 'domestic' 5/10/13A and internal/board level
Most kit survived the ordeal... we had backup generators and I guess part of that included protection from over voltage as well as under volts
UK phase-colours were Red/Yellow/Blue: A pub nearby had its 3-phase supply 'updated'. Unfortunately, the electrician connected 'red' and 'blue' as 'live' and 'neutral' thus exposing every device to 415 V..... The resulting damage was extensive and expensive. Every electrical appliance was replaced.
Fortunately, business was able to continue by candlelight, hand-pumps and cash. ---->
These days, phase colours are Brown/Black/Grey which are sufficiently indistinguishable to encourage checks on completion......
About phase colors and such...
Here on our side of the pond, our "National Electric Code" (a 1+ inch book of letter size paper) specifies that the neutral wire be "white" or "neutral grey". The phase wires can be anything else (maybe not orange, but that is subject to opinion). The idea that a phase gets on the neutral wire isn't very common (or at least I hope so!).
As for voltages, our center-tapped 240 supply (120-0-120 volts) can be lots of things, but at the moment it is about 247 volts according to the electricity meter on the side of the house.
What's the saying, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"?
To be charitable though, maybe it was supplied with a 240->120V converter, and the smoke incident occurred when they plugged it in directly to 240V instead of using that? Or maybe the teller got his consoles mixed up.
The vagaries of time might have caused a mistake.
From memory (I can't pull it out at the moment) the Saturn had an external supply, so it might well have been that rather than the Dreamcast.
At some point I need to actually sort out the old consoles and see if any of them still work, although I'd need to get a voltage converter for the Saturn as IIRC it had a 110v supply and needed a 240 to 110 transformer (Japanese model with a multi region mod/cart from memory).
Got it! Looped in by friend #1 (erstwhile custodian of the Sega.;)
I was surprised that these beasties only had isolation transformers rather than supplying DC say 12V but that may have been before cheap switch mode wall warts. Given the unit got a decent dose of 220-240V AC and survived I suspect the internal PS was a switch mode or at least autoranging.
As for Japan being synonymous with 100V AC mains, I once read elsewhere in this forum and confirmed by wikip the eastern JP is on 100V/50Hz and western JP 200V/60Hz. Moving house from Tokyo to Kyoto could be interesting. (Not that I suppose one could afford to live in either city.;)
For the details of the North American 120/240V split phase system:
https://theengineeringmindset.com/120-240v-split-phase-us-can/
Sodding Rather peculiar IMHO but then what now isn't south of the 49th parallel?
I came across one of the split-phase converters on some old electrical plant. We had to break down a door in order to get access to the mains supply. Two-to-three phase converter with open terminals. It had been installed during WWII to restore supply after bomb damage.
The customer, a utility, was upset because it had no metering so they'd had free electricity for nearly sixty years.
> Rather peculiar IMHO....
It is quite logical, step by step. Tom Edison had no good insulation, but found fewer dead workers around 100V machines, more around higher voltages. So lets use 100V! Works great for small loads in a small lab. Run a furlong to a real load, voltage sags. Well, crank the near end to 105V, 110V, whatever. Works good, now sell more customers. Saggy again. Start to run more wires. Wait! If you run just one more wire (3 instead of 2) across two generators in series, the sag/cost ratio is quite good. Not far short of 3-phase which sure was beyond the state of the art at that time. Oddly, 3 wire split works really well on AC also, gives 110V for lamps (domestic size 230V lamps were a later German invention) and also 230V for cooking and heating loads.
Yes I have two classes of outlets and several sub-types (15A, 20A, 30A, 50A) but they do not interfit and only geeks like me have to know how to change a plug today.
> .....but then what now isn't south of the 49th parallel?
Canada Code is exactly the same as US code except a couple details they do better. It's still all split-phase 15A/20A black and white and bare.
Back then, it was hard to find devices that took multiple voltages. If anybody today releases a device with that dinky cursed voltage switch in the back that needs a screwdriver, it deserves to burn in a 220V plug.
HOWEVER, I remember mum had a GE vaccuum cleaner. Blue finish all around, 110V jobbie. Our home had 220V plugs, and mum had a ginourmous 20 pounds of a brick of a transformer on a tiny dish with wheels, that could take the 1200 watts of the vaccum device.
Guess what the maid did... she fumbled the transformer wires and plugged it directly, the transformer went unused. It spun at twice the speed for 15 seconds, yours truly noticed, and flew towards the circuit breakers and unplugged the mains for the whole house. Being aged 10 back then, I already knew how the mains worked for undisclosed reasons...
The General Electric device took the voltage well, didn't even smell that hard, and still worked perfectly. Oh yes, it was duly overbuilt.
I would be surprised if your telly, your gadgets, and your PC power supply are not 80-250V and 50/60Hz devices these days.
You might be surprised.
I surely was when I lived in the US for half a year in 2019. I went to buy a monitor for my laptop, and most of the cheaper 22-24" jobbies at Best Buy were 115V only. Bought a HP that was both on sale and wide-range, so I could still use it after my return back to Europe. My nephew still uses it.
My father was in the Royal Navy as an electrical artificer. He was on a land ship in Plymouth. I remember him being called back from leave because they had had a power cut, and someone had connected an AC generator to the DC supply, and fried lots of their systems.
The rating who did it had been proud that he had managed to get the connectors to work - despite it looking like they were incompatible! Until the big bang...
We had an attic full of old wartime radios of different voltages, AC/DC and frequencies. My experience on 'trying to get these things going' lead to my acute skill in fault-finding by electrical-odour. And fear of electric shocks.
Even if you know something is 'dead', the first touch should be with the back of your fingers!
In my case it was working my way out of smoked filled rooms of a burning oil rig training exercise in full BA kit, by smacking the walls with the back of my hand, not the palm as if you came came into contact with damaged, exposed & more importantly still live electrical wiring your hand would clench on it.
Icon - Yes we had burning barrels to enhance the experience.
Been there; done that...
Years ago (1998), I was in Australia working on integrating some industrial equipment with some Japanese industrial equipment that communicated via ARCNet. The only ARCNet adapter was an ISA card, so when I had to go off to Japan to work on the final communications, the only option was to take my desktop PC. I powered it down, set the voltage from the 220V of Australia to the 110V of Japan, taped over the selector and flew out.
A week later, I'm back in Sydney with all new source code and chips for the Japanese equipment. Excited to show what we achieved, I plugged everything in, and kerblam! PSU exploded.
At least it was where I could easily source another 220V PSU.
I was in London to support the US in one of the old G-5 economic summits, and our job was to test all of the IT equipment we used. From computers, laptops, modems, power supplies, surge protectors, we had to test everything individually and as a complete set up.
Of like Japan, the US has 110v electricity, and we had power transformers to step the 240V London power down. So I plugged a laptop into one of the transformers and booted it up without issues. Then I plugged in a surge protector to that same transformer and it literally exploded and caught fire. The laptop must have had an international switching power supply because when we checked the transformer, it was putting out almost 400v.
A loong time ago I was working on a project that used Allen-Bradley PLCs that we had to integrate with other software. We asked for a test PLC that ran on a 240V, but when it arrived it looked like it was configured with a 48V DC power supply. After a few acrimonious calls with an arrogant PM who insisted that he knew better we said Okey Dokey, and hooked it up to 240V - after hiding behind a desk :) PSU duly went bang, but only a disappointingly small amount of smoke. Shipped it back, and got a "real" 240V powered one, but no apology from the PM.
Good news was that it gave us one of a number of excuses for "extension of time" - the customer was a Government organisation who, as usual, had faffed around for years writing a spec, asking for tenders, reviewing responses, blah blah blah. At that point the project was now time-critical, so they made us the whipping boy by making us promise to deliver in a ridiculously short time scale (sound familiar anyone?). Luckily they were just as hopeless at contract management as everything else, so we managed to get enough time to do a reasonable job.
I remember something similar, working for a company adjacent to the games industry in the 90's. Shiny new playstation, straight from Japan.
Right let's plug it in and see what this baby can d.. *POP!*
Good job they had more than one ;-)
I also remember we were impressed with the Dreamcast as it looked like it had liquid cooling IIRC (was just a head pipe thing I think in the end)
Back in the very early 2000s (I think) we had a bad batch of Fujitsu base units where the PSUs would randomly set themselves to 110V first thing in the morning. Which made for a rude awakening for the poor unfortunate on the opposite side of the desk as the usual 240V was applied to it at the press of the power button................the fuse went pop pretty loudly in a quiet office!
Back as a student in the 1970's, I had a holiday job working in a hi-fi store. One day, we took delivery of a pair of Quad electrostatic speakers - very expensive and the hen's teeth speakers of the day. We stocked quite a bit of high-end kit, including Quad amps, but the cost of these meant they were only brought in to fulfil customer orders. The customer in question wasn't taking delivery for a few days and the store manager decided to put them on demo (with, AFAIR, a Quad 33/303 amp combo and a B&O turntable - the parallel arm one). He didn't trust any of us to be careful enough so he unpacked them, wired them in and switched on... BANG!!!!
Each speakers had two connections: one for the amp signal and another for mains power. Somehow, our manager had wired them the wrong way round and 230V ac into the line socket was not conducive to speaker longevity. We never found out how he managed to get the connections wrong - as far as I know, the plugs should have been quite incompatible - but the speakers were hastily repacked and returned for replacement.
Back in the late 80s we'd got our software running on IBM mainframes, including in Japanese for screens, printers and pen-plotters. We were then tasked with making the software work on a semi-compatible Japanese mainframe. All went well until an office rearrangement when someone decided that the 100v plug on the dot-matrix printer should be replaced with a 230v one. I did finally find a uk company who repaired the blown components.
Happy memories
Well, up to the fifties Bulgaria was using 150v.
The electrical system was built by a Belgian company in the very, very early 1900's, and at the time incandescent bulbs were supposedly not able to withstand north of 150 volts. Or so the Belgians claimed.
Which locked everybody into 150 volts and some juicy monopolies came out of it.
The country switched to 220v home and 380v 3-phase industrial in the 50s. For a while, people would use step down transformers at home:
https://www.sandacite.bg/wp-content/uploads/balgarski-ponizhavasht-traqnsformator-1.jpg
https://www.sandacite.bg/wp-content/uploads/balgarski-ponizhavasht-traqnsformator-2.jpg
https://www.sandacite.bg/wp-content/uploads/balgarski-ponizhavasht-traqnsformator.jpg
The power supplies on the old Plessey / GEC / Siemens DX phone systems were interesting.
Changing the main PSU units had to be done in a certain way. If you didn't you had the potential to be thrown across the room, as happened to me once.
The shelf power supplies came in two variants, with one having the terminals the opposite way around to the other.
It wasn't unknown for an engineer to wire the supply the wrong way, thus destroying the new supply and potentially damaging cards.
You didn't work at Newbury Labs, did you? We had a spate of large smoothing capacitors reversed on PSUs, so when one VDU started hissing while on soak test I was very cautious before putting my head in to the (switched off) monitor housing to see what was what. A colleague duly banged on the outside, causing peripheral damage to my head on its rather swift withdrawal. Luckily another colleague who had seen what was happening caught hold of my elbow before I lumped the miscreant, while wiping the tears from his eyes. When the red mist had faded I appreciated the skill and timing of the stunt, which of course I would have done myself given half the chance (apart from the fact that I was the team leader).
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