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Dealing with power cuts

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Bowdon:
I recently had a couple of power cuts and it caused me some technical problems when it came to technology, modems, routers, a pc, a kitchen light and a microwave.

I was wondering what is the best strategy to save electric devices while dealing with power cuts?

I'm thinking the problem happens when the power comes back on rather than off. It must be some type of power surge.

The interesting part of this is some of my devices were behind at least 1 surge protector. The pc was behind 2, yet the power surge still got through.

I'm beginning to wonder if surge protectors are a bit of a marketing ploy, and do they actually work?

So I was thinking of possible alternative methods of protecting devices. I know the ultimate solution is to buy a UPS device (which I have). But its not practical to get that up for everything in the house, not least because the UPS can only have a maximum number of devices connected.

So I was wondering, would turning the power off on the back of the pc prevent a surge in the pc, or would only unplugging it completely work?

sevenlayermuddle:
You've been unlucky, we get frequent power cuts here and never had any damage.

But one thing worth mentioning, we had one a few weeks ago, power was off for about two hours while engineers attended at the village substation, after which power was restored but my microwave failed to heat my lunch.   I picked up on a few other symptoms, like a fluorescent light that was slow to come on, and checked the mains voltage... 180V, way below the minimum.

After I called the supplier and moaned about the low voltage they quite promptly returned to the village and waved their magic tools around once more, after which mains was 238V and microwave functioned perfectly.

Without sounding arrogant, I'll bet 9 out of 10 other people would simply have assumed the microwave was deceased, rather than checking supply voltage.   The supplier would have noticed eventually of course, but that could be days later.

Excess mains voltage could equally be the problem, and maybe more likely to cause damage.  Easiest way to check mains voltage is a plug in volt/watt/VA meter, circa £10-15 from Maplin or Amazon, iirc.

j0hn:
A decent surge protector should do the job for surges.
The issue you had with your modem/router in the other thread wasn't a surge. A surge will do physical damage. You suffered from some sort of corruption in the firmware/configuration of the devices, which will be related to suddenly losing power/improper shutdown. Only a UPS would prevent something like this in future.

JGO:
AIUI the problem is more incorrect static supply voltage than a surge ?  In which case a constant voltage transformer (CVT) may be a solution Caution I have heard of them producing a distorted 50HZ waveform which might give further trouble. On the other hand I recall a friend's supply regularly dropped to 180v on Sundays when everyone was cooking dinner, when a CVT would be helpful.

Chrysalis:
UPS is probably the only proper solution.  That also will protect from low voltage situations which I discovered in my area happen quite frequently.

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