Computer room static blowing server power supplies

I think static is highly unlikely as the cause here. My guess would be overvoltage on the line, transients, or inadequate cooling.

On Tue, 04 Apr 2006 16:41:57 -0400, T wrote: ...

Call an exorcist. ;-)

Well, skeptical is good, but usually when troubleshooting, the first question is, "What changed?"

This is a no-brainer. Start looking through your contract with the floor installer, to see if you can have him eat the cost of replacing the killer tile.

Good Luck! Rich

Pretty good, considering that the tiles are the only thing that changed.

I probably wouldn't say, "zinc whiskers", but I'm pretty sure that, except for galvanizing garbage cans, zinc is AWFUL! It gets all over everything. I once worked at a place where they had to scrap a $100,000.00 (or so) Ultra-High-Vacuum bell jar because someone had installed brass connectors - the zinc outgassed, and contaminated the whole thing.

Maybe you could leach the zinc out of your tile by washing it down with muriatic acid. ;-) [1]

I've also seen an installation where a bunch of boxes running off 277V lighting power started arcing, and the only conductive thing in the room was the dust from the desert setting, which could very well have been conductive - it was only about 100 miles from Great Salt Lake. We fixed it by putting furnace filters on top of all of the boxes, which the idiot designer had put all of the intake air vents on the top of. =:-O

It was a pretty sweet TDY[2], though - $1000.00/week plus per diem plus expenses plus airplane ticket plus car rental. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich [1] That's a joke, by the way. If you do use muriatic acid on zinc, be sure that you're in a very very well-ventilated place, because it makes hydrogen gas. But then, you could use the zinc chloride for sunscreen; just mix it with yogurt. ;-) [2] Temporary DutY

Poltergeists.

Cheers! Rich

On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 22:56:16 GMT, Rich Grise put finger to keyboard and composed:

The OP states that "the failures/arcs in our supplies have all arced from the 120vac chopper regulator collector to the PS case."

I would have thought that zinc whiskers would result in random faults.

- Franc Zabkar