I would guess that a lot of it is just 'newsrag speak' to sensationalise an unusual, but otherwise mundane event. It's hard to see from the picture just what has burnt, but I'd be surprised if the boxes were catching light as a result of some internal failure, before the fuse blew. If they did, and there was a genuine risk to life and property, then the manufacturers need to take a very serious look at the materials they are using in the box, and what can be done to minimise the risk. It doesn't say exactly what sort of 'digiboxes' these are, but I would guess that they are probably 'electrical barn' and supermarket Freeview boxes that are made in China, and cost 20 quid retail. If that is the case, then trading standards need to investigate the reasons, and get them withdrawn, if there is an issue.
As to why the digiboxes rather than other devices. Who can tell? About all that I can say is that the power supplies are pretty small, and everything is rated to run by the skin of its teeth in the first place, so it doesn't take much out of the ordinary to fry them. One such supply that I work on, for instance, is a complete standby supply in a little 7 pin DIL chip. Now
380v flying around in a chip that size, just ain't right ...
The supplies used in TV sets and computers and so on, tend to be a bit more robust, and many other wallwart supplies are still linears, although I will grant you that a substantial number are now switchers, and any that were plugged in may well have also been fried by whatever caused this 'newsworthy' event, but the owners would not have seen anything, as they are completely enclosed.
bad or lazy reporting, sounds like second hand information to me.
whilst i suppose with the newer cheaply made stuff it is not impossible for there to be some burnup, on the devices i have repaired which had suffered surges, 99% of the time a resistor or transformer primary in the power supply had opened up before any fireworks. even the traces on the pcb had gone o/c on a couple of items...
I know someone who was up at 3am when his street was affected by such a surge, blew the room lamp and hall lamp after glowing like floodklights and breaking TV. stereo etc but nothing caught fire.
I was most impressed by this local ITV coverage, yesterday or day before, of this sort of matter. Including showing the internals of a SMPS with just 1mm between live and consumer side pcb tracks. Informative and quite technical
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Top tips for avoiding unsafe chargers and adaptors
[i-charger]Most of us plug in, switch on and charge up everyday but with millions of cheap, substandard copies of the latest gadgets and gizmos available online it could actually be our lives that we're playing with.
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Top tips for avoiding unsafe chargers and adaptors
1 Buy from a reputable retailer.
2
If the product itself is not marked with a brand name/logo and model name/number, be suspicious.
3 There should be a 9.5mm gap between the live/neutral pins and the edge of the plug body. [i-plug1] [i-plug2] As a quick check, place your little finger against the plug pin and you should still be able to see the edge of the plug. [i-plug3] [i-plug4]
4 On the socket part of an adaptor the live and neutral contacts should be covered by shutters. If there are no shutters and you can see the live/neutral contacts, the product is unsafe (see picture).
-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
As i said in the other reply I know someone who was up at 3am when his street was affected by such a surge, blew the room lamp and hall lamp after glowing like floodklights and breaking TV, stereo etc but nothing caught fire.
I don't know what you call it because it is oxymoronic, but a slow surge. The first he knew about it was the living room bulb got noticeably brighter and then over 10 seconds or so grew brighter and brighter until it blew, followed by the hall one and then he noticed all the other stuff was no longer working, as he was only reading at the time.
A slow voltage increase would allow things to overheat before any fuses blew.
-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
"N Cook" wrote in news:fqo8ha$6pp$ snipped-for-privacy@inews.gazeta.pl:
Perhaps all the digiboxes were fed from the same cable leg and someone dropped a HT line onto the cable shield. Or dropped the cable shield onto an HT feed?
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please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.
bz+ser@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap
Are you SURE about that 1mm ? Was it REALLY between primary and secondary parts ? That's a straight EN60065 failure and hence illegal to be sold in any part of the EU.
If that is the case, and they really did fail in the way described in the article, then the cable operator would need to be dragged into it as well, as STBs for cable are necessarily supplied by the cable operator. Likewise for satellite TV, assuming Sky, although you can of course buy those yourself. Most people don't, however, because of the price deals offered by Sky, which include the box and installation. Plus these boxes are only made by a few highly reputable main players in the market such as Pace and Panasonic and Grundig etc. That was why I figured that these might well be Freeview boxes for TDTV, as digital is being forced on an unsuspecting public by the government, and punters are being driven like sheep by TV ads, to get converted for digital. And how do they do that ? With a Mickey Mouse twenty quid Chinese box about the size of a paperback book, bought from the local supermarket ...
Isn't it possible then that the failures were caused by either the cable operator or someone else on the same segment injecting/crossing line voltage on the cable line?
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