PNG TIME

ipblocker

12/17/2007

Voltage

the electricity here is provided via a hydroplant (dam) some miles... er.. kilometeres away.

This country uses 3 phase power.
I'm not an electrician, don't ask me to explain.
The long and the short of it is,
many times a day we get under voltage (brown outs) over voltage (spikes), power outages and phase outages.

This wreaks havoc on computer equipment but we've got systems in place to compensate.
(read: a shack full of car batteries daisy chained to an inverter system)

One fun anecdote however,
yesterday we got an over voltage so long, and so high, that the fans all began spinning faster than usual.

One fan, spun soo fast, it began to whistle, and then, the blade flew off it's mount, hit the fan cage, rattled it loose, and sprayed plastic chips in all directions.

Mind you the fan was mounted via a reverse threaded screw which is meant to tighten as the fan spins... so how this happened, we don't know.

But it was exciting!