Where's Reddog's bunker?

[dennishoddy]

Looks like an MOV failure. (Metal Oxide Varistor).

Those and clamping diodes are used in surge suppressors to fail if any voltage exceeds their rated voltage.
Its designed to absorb the potentially destructive energy from a line short, or lightning and fail. Most often the failure is violent, as your pic shows.

One little issue with them is that they ALMOST fail at the speed of light. Almost.....

 

[Shadowrider]

Yep. I'm sure it took a pounding just judging from looking at the lights going up, down, off, repeat, in random order and speed . Just ordered a bunch more APCs off of Amazon. I got a 3080 joule one to replace this Monster, super high end POS. $28 bucks.

Still not sure about my computer speakers because they were and still are plugged into an APC 1500 volt amp UPS on the backup side too since I had the spot open, but they are dead as hell. My computer, extra monitor and UPS are fine, but the speakers aren't.

 

[dennishoddy]

The UPS are kings! The battery absorbs a ton of abuse, and cleans it up before getting to the inverter. They don't last forever though.

 

[Shadowrider]

I just changed out the batteries a few months ago. And APC brand UPS are rock solid, they last for years, just keep the batteries good. They've saved my bacon a bunch of times when I worked in IT.

 

[Lurker66]

You sure it's the speakers and not a sound card? I'm no computer guy but if I remember right my speakers works when I ran sound troubleshooter but some sound card was fugged. As well as my modem.

 

[OKNewshawk]

I blame the power companies buying cheap transformers from the ChiComs...

 

[Shadowrider]

You sure it's the speakers and not a sound card? I'm no computer guy but if I remember right my speakers works when I ran sound troubleshooter but some sound card was fugged. As well as my modem.

Yep. I unplugged them from my iMac and the built in iMac speaker(s) work fine. They just sound like a little tiny something inside of a tomato can. I really don't know why they bother with putting speakers in computers if they can't make them sound better than they do. Same applies to my flat screen Samsung TV. It sounds horrible. I'd be embarrassed if I designed something that performed that badly.

Did I just jack my own thread? Damn...

 

[SoonerP226]

I just changed out the batteries a few months ago. And APC brand UPS are rock solid, they last for years, just keep the batteries good. They've saved my bacon a bunch of times when I worked in IT.

I have a bunch of APC UPSes at work and at home, but even they are not perfect. I had one at home (a 1500VA BackUps Pro unit, IIRC) that was annoying as hell--if it saw any fluctuation in voltage, it would switch to battery and stay there, screeching, until it ran out. It finally picked the wrong day to do it, waking me up several times during the night, and I yanked it out and took out my frustrations on it. And I didn't feel even a tiny bit of regret about it...