Like my cord disconnecting repeatedly? Grandkids... long story.
No. That's blackout lol.
Brownout if where you have lower voltage than 110v at times. Things will still work, but some electronics will commit hari kari. It's one of the worst conditions you can have with electronic devices.
Story time lol.
Had a customer I built a sweet sweet PC for. Worked perfectly. I rarely had customers come back with build issues because I always used top quality parts. She takes it home and a few days later I get a call. It's crashing and acting up. She brought it back to the store. Worked perfectly. She took it home, acted up. Then when she brought it back I replaced the power supply as the symptoms she described made it the likely suspect. This went on for a little over a month. Over that period I ended up replacing literally every single piece of that computer, except for the case.
Mind you, during this time I was extremely busy with many things. So I would have my techs work on the other things while I focused on this computer. During this process, I was asking her about the power situation at her place. She tells me that they just had a garage put up a while back and all the electrical was perfect. Then she said they had bought a tester and testing said everything was good. She was a competent person, as was her husband, so I keep replacing parts and being confused lol.
Every single time it was at the shop it worked perfectly. I was just replacing parts because it was a puzzle to me.
Finally she says I don't want this POS. I want my money back and on and on. So I said look. You see that it's behaving here. And it only messes up at your place. You have insisted that your end is fine and haven't wanted me to troubleshoot it there. I'm willing to refund your money if I can't get it to work at your place. She agreed.
I go over to their place, turn on the computer, and after a few minutes it acts up. A few minutes later it crashes. Restart. Acts funny. It's fine. On and on it goes. But I notice there's a timing to the symptoms.
I ask her again about dirty power, and she insists they have tested it and bought a special tester. She goes and gets it. I'm expecting electricians tools. She brings me a ground fault tester...
That, of course doesn't show anything that I needed to see.
So we take a break. And she's showing me her new garage. It's like a 5 car garage. Tons of neon light beer signs, a few extra old fridges, pool table, some electric heaters, and florescent lights hanging everywhere. We go back inside, and I start noticing something. Everything is electric, everything. Old fridge in the house. Radiant heat in every room, electric stove, water heater, you name it.
So I went back to the computer. Every single time the computer glitched, I heard a noise from the other room. Ended up that with all the electric items in the house and garage, the panel was at capacity. And when the fridge in the kitchen kicked on the compressor draw was causing a brownout condition making the PC crash. I went to the car and pulled out a battery backup with an integrated line conditioner and connected it to the PC. It ran 110v from the battery so it was always clean power.
We sat there playing on the computer for an hour laughing. She was a good person and we got along well. And now she understood what I had been saying all along about dirty power. That town had somewhat sketchy power in certain areas. Appliances don't care much about dirty power. Electronics definitely do. I ended up giving her the conditioner, and she became a great referral for new customers.
Similar to pure sine wave, modified sine wave, and unmodified non inverter generator power. Certain items can handle certain things.
