Re: Power consumption

Yeah, floating neutrals can be extremely bad news. I fixed a couple of them for
a friend that had an arcade. One time he had a neutral go open and some games
were on one side of the neutral and a small TV and a desk fan was on the other
side. The TV blew its transformer and then the fan ended up with the entire 240
volts---it caught on fire! The second time it happened to him it was an Atari
Stunt Cycle and a couple of Taito videos versus a bank of pop machines. The
Stunt Cycle worked after replacing its fuse, both the Taito games had MOVs that
burned.

The neutral in a house is supposed to have THREE ground points. One is out at
the transformer, one is a copper rod driven in the ground at the meter on your
house, and the third is to the houses incoming water service pipe. From what
you described, you were losing the one to the transformer.

Oh, and the guy with the orange outlets.... These are isolated ground outlets,
usually used in businesses for computerized cash registers. The third prong is
isolated from the mounting lugs so no connection is made to the outlet box.
This allows the third prong to be grounded back to the breaker panel via a
separate ground wire. A REAL good thing for electronic equipment, supposed to
cut down on power noise.

Bret Pehrson wrote:

> 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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> >
>
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