A powerful problem

Back in the day when I was institutionalized at the United States Military Academy, we took a heavy load of science, mathematics, and engineering courses, regardless of whatever we thought our major was. One of the more detested classes was Electrical Engineering, or “Juice”as we called it. Juice was a very simple course: learn a series of standard formulas relating to how electricity works and apply them to a series of problems. The challenge was that electricity is, frankly, perverse.  We often use analogies to water (electricity “flows” for example), but these are really wrong, for electricity behaves in ways counter-intuitive to the water-in-pipes model, in that it flows both ways, or doesn’t flow at all, or pulses, or…well, you get it. Except that some cadets did not get it, which meant they never knew which formula to use in what situation, and they struggled. The Juice professors were also in on the gag: they always provided a set of meaningless data points so you could not tell which formula to use just by what data was in the problem.

What we all knew was that we would never need this information again.  The only thing I can remember for sure from Juice was the phrase “Volts don’t kill; amps do.” This in fact is also a gross simplification, since the two are related, and both can do harm. Which I re-learned recently.

It hit 90 degrees a few days last week, and we decided to turn on our mini-split air conditioners.  Regular readers will recall the sad tale of the installation, complete with extra holes and severed water lines, but that is all in the past. Now, we get to reap the benefits of cool, fresh air as we sit in our living room and watch the television.  Except when I click the remote, nothing happens.  Maybe old batteries? We have not used the air conditioner since it was installed in December (when we watched the installers turn it on); maybe the remote was not mated to the unit? Nope, I checked and both remotes worked with our bedroom a/c, but nada with the living room unit.

We got a hold of the folks who installed the units. They had me double check the breakers in our fuse box, which were all working. So they came out. They double checked all the connections but saw nothing amiss. They opened up the unit and showed me the computer chip circuit board, which was clearly “fried.”  Bad news. This led to a quick trip back to our fuse box, where the installer showed me with his voltmeter that the power coming into my casa was running at 244 volts.

Now voltage varies whenever electricity is delivered, but it is supposed to be regulated so it varies within an acceptable range. In the States and down here, voltage should be around 110/120 or 220/240, depending on the type of power supply. At my house, it should be 220.  So 244 is too high, especially since that was a one-time reading and the voltage may spike even higher. That is what happened to my new a/c: a spike cooked the chip circuit.  It could affect any electronic device I have.

So now we have to notify CFE, the power authority, because the high voltage is coming in to at least my entire neighborhood, and it should not be . Meanwhile, we’re scrambling to find a whole-house voltage regulator to protect our appliances and electronics from spikes (or drops: such brown-outs can be just as damaging!) in the future. I recall reading about high and low voltage problems locally, but I had the (false) impression that our newer development had a community voltage regulator. No one seems to know if we do (still checking), but even if we do, it failed, so we’ll get one for ourselves regardless.

Back in the States, we had surge protectors for some of our personal electronics, but since the problem here is both too much or too little voltage, we’ll need to get regulators, especially to protect the fridge and TV. The entire episode was just a reminder that you can’t take anything for granted as an expat: if someone else has a problem with infrastructure, you likely do too…you just don’t know it yet!