Bizarre Power Outage
 

I got woken up in the middle of the night with the feeling that the noise was a power outage coming back on in my villa. When I got up found the oven and coffee maker clocks flashing showing they had lost power, but the microwave was fine. Checked the electrical panel, all was fine. Has that ever happened to you? I can't figure out what could have happened.

I think it could be the power fluctuated a tiny bit and those two appliances are very sensitive to power fluctuations.
Up north I've had the same thing happen.

I agree with above, probably a very short interruption.

Interesting. Never had just a couple outlets be affected before. Thanks for the input.

Sensitive GFI on some outlets

you may want to look into having a surge protector put on the meter by whomever supplies your electricity...it's not the end all solution, but it does help with the minor 'surges'

we had one on our home in Ft Lauderdale and had one installed when we moved to TV

now when one clock starts blinking, they're all blinking LOL

Now that would seem normal! Thanks for the comment

It wasn't the outlets, it was the sensitivity of certain appliance to minor fluctuations. A longer outage would have affected all the appliances.

Power companies switching power supplies.

nick has the CORRECT ANSWER. Some appliances allow a short drop in service and still maintains the clock and settings.

Skip

Ghosts????

:1rotfl: :1rotfl: :1rotfl:

Thanks Nick, I prefer your assessment to the "ghosts" one!

Power Surge
 

My village has these power surges all the time! SECO calls them "Blinks."

One way you can fix this problem, is to buy a small UPS for the power sensitive device. Years ago before I retired, when I was working, I used an alarm clock radio CD to wake up. It was a nice clock radio CD, but had no battery backup, and was sensitive to short power outages. So, I plugged the clock radio CD onto a small UPS unit, and that permanently fixed the problem.

Having a few UPS units around the house will prevent power sensitive things from having problems. That will cover the small electrical outages, before your whole house electric generator automatically starts. If you don’t have a whole house electric generator, then the UPS will keep the device working from about 20 minutes to many hours, depending on the capacity of the UPS and the load of the device.

My guess is a rodent "rode the lightning" somewhere and caused a momentary drop in line voltage.

Switching of 115kv feeders typically takes longer than what most clocks will tolerate.

Better get yourself the industrial surge protector. You can lose the circuit boards in your appliances. It is expensive

There are two phases of power coming into the house. Sometimes power can be lost on one phase, but not the other. So that could explain why some appliances lost power, but not others. Or, like others have said, some appliances are more sensitive to power loss than other appliances.

Unless there was, at some point, 3 phase brought into the home, each phase from the transformer was derived from a single phase on the pole.

It's quite common for businesses and industrial buildings to lose a phase as they have true multiple phases entering the building. Residential phases are all split from a single at the transformer. Again, unless there was 3 phase in the building for some reason. Those are truly separate phases.

This information is incorrect. Most homes are supplied single phase, 3-wire, 120/240 volts, not two phases.

Electrical household appliances have various sensitivities to dips in supply voltages and their durations.

Our entire neighborhood in The Historic Section Blinked for exactly one second. Power came back on and we've been fine since this happened last night at about 11.30.

dont use ups on appliances
 

Ups's are ok for clock radio or computer but don't think about using a ups on any appliance.

Depending on design, some devices will function through different 'blinks' better than others. Internally it has to do with the size of capacitors and the age of some devices as caps some caps will dry out in time. China tends to cut every corner possible and you will likely have better luck with Korean or Japanese made imports.

Brief outage. Happens all the time.

Cool! Thanks

I'm in the historic section too. Did some of your appliances' clocks start blinking and others not?

Some devices hold enough "voltage" in their circuit board capacitors **OR** even have a small backup battery in them to hold the time & any settings in a clock or other device during a quick outage. I can unplug my microwave for 10-15 seconds (at most) and it maintains the time and all the other settings while my stove and a number of other devices immediately flash. For a test if you have easy access to the microwave plug just unplug it for a few seconds and plug it back in and see if it is blinking. Kind of like my Keurig brewer. I can unplug it (the clock goes off) and plug it in and it retains time and memory either because it has a backup battery in it or just a slow discharging capacitor in the clock's voltage line.

Yes Ed, I tried that, but even just one second unplugged the microwave's clock reset to 00:00.