Power outages can kill PSUs?

[CP5670]

There was a strange power outage in my area earlier today (no severe weather or anything) and it seems that my 520W Powerstream is completely dead now. Even the standby power light on my motherboard isn't coming on. I tried plugging in the Modstream from my other machine into that computer and it gets that far, although I haven't tried booting it up yet (didn't have time to reconnect all the cables and everything; I'll do that a bit later). I hope my other components are okay.

I've heard of power surges causing these PSU failures, but can power outages do the same thing? I have the computer on a surge strip but not a UPS, as outages like this aren't very common here.

I have a replacement on the way but it will take a few days to arrive. This is the second time in two weeks that I'm RMAing this Powerstream; the original one had a broken fan out of the box.

I guess I'm going to need to redo all the neat cabling work I had done.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Yeah it is possible, because sometimes right before the power goes out there is a spike. How old is the surge suppressor? An old one is sometimes no good anymore. I found out the hard way once lost my mobo and CPU.

I assume you did check the little switch on the back of the PSU right?

 

[Zepper]

More than likely one of the surges that happened when the power came back on took out the fuse in your PSU - that's the most dangerous time for equipment. Lot's of people will put a drop out relay on their systems so if the power goes away, the PC would automatically be disconnected from the power until they manually reset the relay. Used to be able to buy a surge protector that had a dropout relay integrated. Haven't seen one in years.

Replace the fuse and you're probably good to go. Any halfway decent tech could check to see if it's blown and replace it in 10 minutes. Or you could send it to OCZ and have them check it out.

.bh.

 

[CP5670]

I think you're right. The rest of the system is fortunately okay (I ran it off the Modstream and it seems to work fine) and it looks like the surge was localized to the PSU. I may be able to replace the fuse, but OCZ is sending me a replacement anyway so I'll just wait for that.

Is there anything I can do to avoid this in the future? I could get a UPS, but I'm not sure if it would really have helped.

Yeah it is possible, because sometimes right before the power goes out there is a spike. How old is the surge suppressor? An old one is sometimes no good anymore. I found out the hard way once lost my mobo and CPU.

I assume you did check the little switch on the back of the PSU right?

Yeah, I must have frantically flipped that at least 20 times. The surge protector is an APC Surgearrest Personal 7 that I got four or five years ago. Are the newer ones better?

 

[Zepper]

Some UPSes have a delay that can be set that varies the time between going back to the line AC after an outage.. then there is always a "true UPS" that always runs the equipment off the battery and only uses the AC to keep the battery charged. But they are expensive

.bh.