I'd love to know if anyone has any ideas on this one: my cable TV's coaxial cable seems to have electrocuted my mainboard, and is carrying AC voltage.
I have regular analog cable. It comes into my house, and I have a passive splitter installed inline. One of the cable runs from the splitter goes directly into my TV. The other end connects to a run of about 50 feet which I've attacted along the ceiling over to my PC. This run is attached right next to an ethernet run. In this way I normally have my PC running as a PVR.
Recently my mainboard failed. I bought another one, but when I was hooking things back up I got a jolt when I had one hand on my case (aluminum) and the other on the metal connector on my coaxial drop by the PC. Turns out that, when the PC is plugged in and the PSU is on, I have about 55 volts AC between the power supply casing and the coaxial cable. When I have the PSU off, the difference is about 95 volts. DC voltage in both cases is negligible. I don't have a meter that's good enough to measure the AC current.
I've muckety-mucked with this stuff quite a bit when setting it up -- plugging and unplugging -- and never got a shock before my mainboard died. I suspect that something has changed, and that the voltage on the line is new. The house in which I live has several generations of wiring; I do get uniform results on every outlet I've tried (currently, 4 outlets in 2 boxes). At this time I'm not doing the PVR thing, until I get this resolved. I'm wondering if my TV is at risk -- I suspect that it is.
Anyone dealt with this sort of thing before? I've found some solutions like DC power blocks, but they are effective against DC voltage, and don't make a noticable difference in my AC voltage. If anyone has any ideas of things I could try, I'd really appreciate it. I can contact my cable company, but my local cable provider was bought out by a small outfit in another state, and calling them for customer service usually a pointless exercise. Thanks for any insight...
I have regular analog cable. It comes into my house, and I have a passive splitter installed inline. One of the cable runs from the splitter goes directly into my TV. The other end connects to a run of about 50 feet which I've attacted along the ceiling over to my PC. This run is attached right next to an ethernet run. In this way I normally have my PC running as a PVR.
Recently my mainboard failed. I bought another one, but when I was hooking things back up I got a jolt when I had one hand on my case (aluminum) and the other on the metal connector on my coaxial drop by the PC. Turns out that, when the PC is plugged in and the PSU is on, I have about 55 volts AC between the power supply casing and the coaxial cable. When I have the PSU off, the difference is about 95 volts. DC voltage in both cases is negligible. I don't have a meter that's good enough to measure the AC current.
I've muckety-mucked with this stuff quite a bit when setting it up -- plugging and unplugging -- and never got a shock before my mainboard died. I suspect that something has changed, and that the voltage on the line is new. The house in which I live has several generations of wiring; I do get uniform results on every outlet I've tried (currently, 4 outlets in 2 boxes). At this time I'm not doing the PVR thing, until I get this resolved. I'm wondering if my TV is at risk -- I suspect that it is.
Anyone dealt with this sort of thing before? I've found some solutions like DC power blocks, but they are effective against DC voltage, and don't make a noticable difference in my AC voltage. If anyone has any ideas of things I could try, I'd really appreciate it. I can contact my cable company, but my local cable provider was bought out by a small outfit in another state, and calling them for customer service usually a pointless exercise. Thanks for any insight...
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