stevencotton

Hey,

It's really annoying, our mains supply seems to make all household appliances buzz, quite regularly (I mean pattern wise, 15 second gap, buzz 1, 1 second gap, buzz 2, 15 second gap), but not all the time. My TV is the worst, it's so bad it wakes me up, have to unplug everything to stop it. As I'm writing this my monitor is buzzing wildly away and really annoying me. House is 150 years old or so, so it wouldn't surprise me if it needs a rewire anyway. Any electricians that can shed some light on what causes it?

Cheers,
Steve.

scooby nutter

Not a Electrician but if your house is that old it might have rubber cable!!This ,like all other rubber things perishes and becomes very brittle and can start house fires!

Call a electrician to get it checked out.
better to be safe.

Brendan Hughes

Not only rubber. My house had little polystyrene ball cavity wall insulation, and PVC cable running unshielded through the walls: electricians said that slowly they would react and melt the shielding. Under some floorboards (guy had used it to insulate water pipes too) you could see this had started to happen.

Dunno what happened, I sold the house

Sorry, not sure about the buzzing though!

BJH

Shark

Steven

If your serious about your pc get a UPS. IMHO it's an essential piece of kit. I lost a disc full of data to bad mains Lucky I had an old backup - lost some stuff i would rather not have tho.

David

Mufasa

Most likely culprit is (as has been said already) rubber cable insulation on a house 150 years old braking down. However, Old fridge and freezer compressors are notorious for this. Some just send a big spike down the supply as they kick in (CRACK! through any speakers plugged in at the time), others buzz merrily away while they're running.

Muf

Luke

Star earth your mains( Run a new earth out side the house.Change fuseboard. Buy a suppressor from "maplins" The best is from "Russ Andrews. Re-wire house!!

stevencotton

Hmm, I thought as much. Unfortunately it's not my house, I'm just a tennant, and the house needs so much work anyway to bring it up to standard I think the owner is looking in the tens of thousands. We get power-cuts on a weekly basis but they don't bother me too much, fsck is pretty good and I have backups I'll just move instead.

Cheers,
Steve.

Toerag

If you're just a tenant then get your landlord to fix it!!!!
You can get mains 'testers' which print out graphs of spikes and suchlike. I guess your local electricity provider will loan you one, or at least prove the fault to be in or out of your house. A colleague of mine had mains problems so he borrowed our mains tester from work to discover that the 240v was actually 170v 'cos a fuse in a roadside cabinet had blown and his house was being powered the 'wrong' way round the ring!

GavinP

Steve,

Sorry to hear of your woes!

Take a look at "The Power and the Glory" from Russ Andrews:

http://www.russandrews.com/downloads.html

There is a bit in there as I recall about them hiring out test equipment at a small fee and goes into a lot of detail including complaining to the electric company about the quality of supply.

Thanks

Gavin