I’m borrowing my husband’s laptop again. Normally I wouldn’t be doing this, I love my laptop but in the last three months I’ve managed to cook two ac adapters. I’m sure you’re thinking that I must be hard on my electronic equipment. My husband even accused me of it until he realized that there is no way that I could have blown two ac adapters back to back through sheer abuse of the cords, especially when the bricks, not the cables, are the cause of the adapter’s demise.
After doing some research I’ve determined that the cause of the ac adapter blow ups is directly related to two sudden power outages that we had while the adapters were plugged into the wall. The first of these happened when a construction company cut through a power line. My first ac adapter died the next day. We also had another power outage in the middle of the night one night while my laptop was plugged into the second ac adapter. Two days later, the brick died.
We’ve been experiencing power fluctuations and general weirdness since we moved into this house. We’ve had the power company out to check things out more than once and they claim to be delivering us clean power but after the two ac adapters were blown, three wireless routers and three televisions… I have to wonder if all of these incidents are related. The routers, televisions and my laptop were not plugged in to power strips with surge protectors and my husband never leaves his laptop sitting somewhere with the ac adapter plugged in. If he’s not using it, it’s in his backpack.
With this coincidence in mind, we’re looking at getting some kind of whole house surge protection installed, and the whole house surge protection device my husband is talking about is less expensive than all of the electronic equipment we have lost. I imagine that after it’s installed we won’t lose our delicate electronics anymore and that will be that.
But, our power company will still claim that it’s not their fault, though I have to wonder who else could be to blame for surges, outages and brownouts… isn’t it funny how the world works?
