[Letitring]

For about the past 3 months we've been having weird power surges with folks losing tv's, computers, various appliances. Power Co says call Ins. co., of course, Ins. companies say call power co. Meanwhile, nothing gets done.

This morning I was awakened by that weird noise, again, of a huge groaning sound, followed by brief power outage. It's not a blown transformer, local, I know that sound. This is a massive moan, groan, type sound. Then all the power goes off. It's always come back within a short amount of time, but who knows! Just wondered if anyone else has experienced this.

[all4one]

Two nights ago there was a huge power outage in my area that lasted for about 2 hours. Probably at least a 5+ square mile area. Nothing in the local papers or news the next day. I have been googling "outage" and "power" for the last few months. There have been at least 3-5 incidents of power outages across the US each day during that time...and those are just the ones that have been reported. I also get numerous articles on outages in Canada, UK and Australia as well.

[Myrddin]

This morning I was awakened by that weird noise, again, of a huge groaning sound, followed by brief power outage.

You may have been experiencing a "brown out" (low voltage) before the power failure. Appliances with compressors (refrigerator, freezer, air conditioner) can be damaged by a prolonged brown out. The voltage isn't sufficient to drive the device, but it is sufficient to cause a build up of heat. Next time you hear your appliances groaning, make a beeline for the breaker that supplies your sensitive appliances and shut them off. An ordinary incandescent bulb may display a dimming behavior. Putting an AC voltmeter on a power plug is the only certain way to observe the problem. A power engineer would plug in a recording voltmeter to catch the problem over a prolonged observation period.

A typical piece of equipment used to detect and diagnose this kind of problem is made by Dranetz