You’re grounded!
Ok, so this is kinda cool. Over the past, oh I don’t know, couple of months we’ve been noticing our house lights flickering. It was always hard to nail down. Was something on? Did you just hit the garbage grinder or did the drier just go on? Furthermore it was only noticeable with the remaining few incandescent lights we have left (florescent lights, compact or otherwise, are usually too slow to register momentary voltage changes).
Finally I decided to check the UPS I run this server on. Once I realized that I’d never updated it’s network settings after my last network rehashing and reconfigured it to properly page me on power “events” we were good to go.
The result was immediate: we got 15 power spikes in 24 hours. So last night we decided to call PG&E and to our surprise they sent someone out w/in an hour.
The PG&E guy hooked up a “glorified hair drier” to our house power. “Yeah, there’s a problem.” We were spiking and dipping almost 10 volts (due to the nature of the APC SNMP module I have it would only page me on dips of over 14 volts so I missed those). He then opened up the junction box that serves both our house and the neighbor’s house and found that the ground (cable) was both loose and corroded.
Geez, man, no ground? It’s a wonder we still have any working electronics in the house.
So after some cable cleanup — and a planned power outage or two — both our house and our neighbor’s house have clean power once again.
Props to the PG&E man and the UPS logging capability.
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