So the other day, I noticed that several electrical devices in my house were acting very strangely at the same time.
My fridge had an error code that was saying there’s some kind of communication problem between the main board and the user interface board, my phone charger wouldn’t charge correctly, and our dish network box was kind of going nuts. Eventually powering them all off and back on managed to eventually reset them all, and all seem to be working fine now.
The weird thing was that it didn’t affect everything- my laptop and PC were both fine, and our oven and microwave were fine. So was the 2nd fridge.
Had it been one of them, or had they all happened at different times, I’d have just chalked it up to digital weirdness. But it was all three at roughly the same time.
Was it a power surge? Something else? Coincidence?
Possibly. But if nothing failed, my WAG is that a brownout occurred. A lot of weirdness can occur to (some) electronics when they experience a brownout.
Could be; typically if we get a flicker, the oven/range does some sort of safety lock-out, where I have to go deliberately unlock it before anything will light up. That didn’t happen this time.
Maybe the voltage wasn’t low enough long enough to flip the oven or the computers out?
If there’s a momentary increase (“surge”) in voltage, most electronics will react in one of two ways: 1) nothing; it won’t care about the increase in voltage, or 2) if the voltage is really high, a component will fail (often catastrophically) and cause the entire device to fail.
If there’s a momentary decrease in voltage (“brownout”), most electronics will react in one of two ways: 1) nothing; it won’t care about the decrease in voltage, or 2) it will try to resume normal operation when the voltage is back to normal, but often times it will result in weird behavior, and the “fix” is to cycle the power to it.
If the voltage goes to zero for a brief time (“blackout”), most electronics will fully recover and resume normal operation.
Of course, that’s a overly-simplistic description of what usually happens. It’s often the case that there will be a surge, followed by a brownout, followed by a surge, etc. etc. over a second or two. To put it succinctly: some things won’t care, some things will act flaky for a couple seconds and then fully recover, some things will be stuck in a weird mode and you’ll need to cycle the power, and some things will emit smoke.