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On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Rob Beard wrote:
Not good, I must admit I did wonder about that. Where I'm working at the moment they have a combination of 240V in the offices and 240V and 110V in the factory areas. I was given the task of testing some PCs to go back at the end of the lease and forgot to check the voltage switch.Let's just say a few sparks and a big bang later I now know what happens when you plug a PC into a 240V mains connection when it's set to 110V :-)Just got to see what happens when you plug in a 240V power supply into a 110V connection now :-D
Surprised they're not auto-voltage...Way back (mid 90's) I worked for an ISP and we used to import 4U rack boxes from the US - which all had the PSUs set to 110V )-:
Even further back, (early 90's) I was working on a big computer that had a PSU in each module (of 4 power-hungry big sparc based boards + 4 whopping 1GB drives!) the PSU was rated at 1KVA - and was auto voltage sensing - this was early days for such devices, but it did mean we could use the same PSUs anywhere (240 in the UK, 110 and 220 in the US and Japan, etc.) - however at one installation in the US they suffered frequent brown-outs and once it got down to about 70V (from a 220V supply) - Now there was nearly 4 times the normal current going into it to try to maintain the output power - needless to say the input wiring didn't last very long....
The biggest one we built had about 80 such modules... Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq