Post by Jeff GainesNothing really gets turned off nowadays except when I have a power cut!
Our electronic equipment gets plenty of power-cycles from power cuts!
We've had five power cuts this month, two today. And at this time of
year, power cuts have been common for the past five years that we've
been in the house. The power company gives excuses but never fixes the
problem so it never occurs. Excuses include: overhanging branches (so
prune them *in advance*) and cattle using the poles as back-scratchers
(load of crap, according to farmers who don't happen to keep animals in
the fields that have the HV power line poles).
I shall be phoning Northern Powergen tomorrow to find out why we have
had so many, and (as I've done in previous years) raise a complaint so
the problem gets some visibility rather than disappearing into a black
hole as soon as I've spoken to the support droid.
In most cases, it's just a couple of seconds - 1-hour or more is rare -
but 1 second is plenty long enough to make everything reboot. And our
mesh network nodes are not very good at reconnecting if they all come
back on simultaneously - I usually have to turn them on in sequence one
at a time. (*)
When you have five nodes dotted around the house, it gets expensive if
you have to buy a UPS for every one of them :-(
Thinking of equipment "coming back to life" after it appears to be dead...
I had a VHS VCR. One day it went into "stupid mode": all the time that
the power was turned on, it shuttled the tape at fast-play or slow-FF
speed and would not respond to any of its controls, either on the VCR
itself or on the remote.
I took it to a TV repair shop who pronounced sentence of death, and gave
me two choices: pay a nominal repair charge and take the VCR home (to
give it a decent burial?) or give it to the shop for spares and pay
nothing. I chose to keep it.
However in the intervening time while the shop was investigating, I went
out and bought another VCR because the prognosis on the "dead" one
sounded so poor.
When I got the VCR back, I checked that the fault still existed (it did)
and then I put it in a cupboard, reluctant to chuck it. Once day I
decided to give it one last chance before I took it to the tip. And it
worked perfectly. And continued to do so for about 5 years until it was
made obsolete by digital TV and recording TV on a computer. It was no
great hardship to have two VCRs because it meant I could record two
things simultaneously. That was about 20 years ago. I think the VCR
still works: I know I copied some old VHS home movies to digital format
(for DVD) a couple of years ago, and I think it was the supposedly-dead
one I used rather than its younger brother.
From a 2024 viewpoint, it seems incredible that we put up with the
restrictions of recording things to tape: having to wind backwards and
forwards; only able to record a maximum of 15 hours unattended (5-hour
tape recording at EP = 1/3 SP speed); not being able to edit out
commercials for things you want to keep; poor picture quality etc.
But the first VCRs were the dog's wotsits at a time when if you went out
for the evening, you missed a programme unless it was ever repeated.
It's so easy to take technology like that for granted.
(*) Are devices sold which act as a variable-delay switch? So when the
power comes back, each node can be automatically turned on a different
number of seconds after the power was restored.