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by hedora 96 days ago
The California bay area, at least all the sides of it I’ve lived on. We currently have a whole house battery, whole house surge protector, a second surge protector, and a UPS between the router/nas/etc and PG&E.

It’s not good enough. At least the power stays on once the grid stops bouncing (or once I manage to log into the rebooting battery gateway computer to have it flip the “off grid” breaker, or go outside and flip the manual one by the meter).

3 comments

I've lived all over the peninsula, your experience is not normal.

I had far more power outages during my late teenage years in suburban Dallas than I've ever had in the bay. That was due to a bad transformer in the neighborhood which took years to replace, but once it was replaced everything was perfect. The moral of the story being: if your power is bad, it's probably because some piece of mains infrastructure near you is broken.

I had a string of annoying outages in 2023-2024, but it was all due to main service upgrades on my street, can't really complain about that.

Huh, interesting. I've lived in the bay area for 22 years (first 6 of them in various places from SJ up the peninsula, remainder in SF), and I've never experienced damage to anything due to a power surge.

Not saying you're lying, but I do wonder if your experience is typical.

Color me skeptical. I've lived in several different Bay Area cities for decades. There are usually a couple power outages per year but I've never experienced a surge strong enough to cause equipment damage.