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A couple of years ago while I was living in the Rockhampton area we had a couple of new appliances go in quick succession, microwave and my brand new PC. When the techs looked at the appliances for insurance purposes he claimed that we had had a brown out causing the damage, insurance paid for new PC. For a couple of weeks our TV would turn itself off occasionally and our lights would dim and then come back bright. We made a complaint to Ergon about the power fluctuations and they fitted a power sampler to the house and monitored at 5min intervals the voltage to our house, after a week they came and told us no problems where seen. Now in the meantime I bought a UPS (Opti-UPS 525bt) and was using that on the PC, now this UPS as the provision to monitor, via a cable and software, the voltage and it was all over the place from just below 200V to over 250V with a sample rate of 1 sec intervals for a week (I believe the guarantee is +/- 10%) so the voltage was going down below the threshold. I bought an old 486 PC to run some Ham radio software and during one of these brownouts the 486 PC died making it the second PC in about 3 months to die, no great loss I got it at a garage sale for $50 including 15" monitor. I made another complaint which was ignored totally obviously I am a troublemaker.
About a week later I was working at the uni and my wife SMSed me telling me that the lights, microwave the interior light on the fridge was flashing on and off I told her to turn everything off and on the way home I went into Ergon to let them know there was a problem again to be told yes they already know and a team had been dispatch to look into it.
Before my wife could turn everything off the fridge let out the magic blue/green smoke.
When I got home the Ergon team where up the powerpole in front of my place, one of the neighbors had notice flashing on the insulator. Sure enough the power line had been burning itself out from the inside of the cable somehow. I went to Ergon and spoke to the claims/complaints people and about a week later I had a visit from the area manager(?) with a promise to pay for the damage caused to my appliances. A new fridge and a new PC the $50 PC became a $1500 PC.
Adrian
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