RE: Power consumption

With all this talk of power consumption...

One thing that you *really* have to be careful is that you have a good
connections to the primary service.

Recently, whenever my laser printer would kick in, the lights on the same
circuit would dim, lights on other circuits would brighten. At first I
didn't think much of it (it was a new printer), but I ended up calling the
power company to see what they said.

They sent out a tech, he hooked up some tester (a fan/heater with several
meters) to the main service and sure enough, I had some bad connections at
the junction from the main service to my house (out in the street). He
ended up redoing a whole mess of connections for the whole block.

He said that this is a bad condition because what happens is that it ends up
drawing a lot more voltage through one wire (in my case, 140+ volts) when
there is a drain (go figure). Result: you can fry a lot of junk.

So, my recommendation is that if you have a lot of games that you switch on
at once, make sure that you call the power company to come and check out
your service.

(If this message is incoherent, I apologize -- it's been a long day.
Hopefully you get the idea though.)

Bret

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-vectorlist@synthcom.com
> [mailto:owner-vectorlist@synthcom.com]On Behalf Of Matt J. McCullar
> Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 9:56 PM
> To: vectorlist@synthcom.com
> Subject: Re: VECTOR: Power consumption
>
>
> Most Atari games had metal signs on the back that usually said three amps.
>
> When I worked at Six Flags Over Texas, we used three amps as a rough
> estimate for the current draw of an average game. One problem with an old
> amusement park is, after 40 years the original electrical wiring
> schematics
> for the park are null and void. Everything in it has been moved, dug up,
> modified, spliced, lost, re-discovered, given up for lost, or just plain
> broken. We had one arcade with 80 games that we could not
> control properly
> from a breaker box; it was either turn on the whole building at
> once, or not
> at all. We had no idea what most of the other circuit breakers in the box
> did, and were loathe to try without telling anyone. Imagine what a power
> surge 80 games coming on at once does. They didn't like it, either, but
> there was nothing we could do about it except fix busted power
> supplies. I
> had no shortage of work during my term. :)
>
> Matt J. McCullar
> Arlington, TX
>
>
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Received on Thu Oct 12 01:16:15 2000