I got a electrical interruption on 12/12 for 20 mins, maybe involving a extra electrical charge before/during that, which involved all my area. This was confirmed by email by Romandie Energie, which said that they had to remove power for safety reasons in my area as there was an accident while working on a road. What happened is that after that 2 my PCs (1 win desktop and 1 macmini) didnt power up anymore since then. Tried all with them, even replacing the power supply with one of them, the motherboard is burnt i beleive.
Here in Vaud, we have a cumpolsory fire ensurance that covers that as well (ECA) and i am asking if ithey pay me back this damage.
Anybody has got any experience with that?
I guess they will not pay if it's only a electrical interruption.... or any other caveats would apply to avoid to give me any $$... they asked me for a technical report from a company to say that it's that the fault in the computer... so i would need to spend more money just for a stupid paper.
So i bought a UPS kit that covers my valuable assets now from this kind of events... but a bit p""!!d off that i toasted 2 PCs....
I think for all the money we pay them, they should be there for these cases...
If the fault was a result of "an accident while working on the road", it is entirely plausible that the neutral line serving your property was cut. This could have resulted in around 400 volts (instead of the usual 230 volts) at the power sockets.
Have you complained to Romandie Energie and said that the power incident of the 12/12 resulted in damage to some items of electrical equipment.
Whereas I think you should read your contract in advance and get extra insurance coverage if you think you're missing something, rather than later complaining that because you pay a lot of money for a service, that service should also include something that it apparently doesn't.
No idea whether that situation is covered or not, though - I don't believe we have an equivalent in Zug.
Which house ? The OP has said nothing on the subject. Here, in our house, we 4 (overhead) wires entering: phases R,S,T and neutral. There is even a big notice at the fusebox where the wires enter the house warning that the neutral must remain connected while any phase conductor is connected.
Beware that you need surge protection. If the UPS does not provide it this kind of power failure can damage your UPS and devices connected to it.
Back home, I have been using Belkin surge protector after such accident. It comes with it's own lifetime warranty on connected equipment (mine had 100k €)
Unfortunately Belkin does not do Swiss sockets. Does anyone know similar trusted brand with lifetime warranty for connected equipment for Swiss sockets?
a) No you loose the connected equipment warranty - the device must not be tampered and specifically it must be connected directly to the wall socket and all equipment must be also directly connected
b) I'm using it right now but because I am using the adapter the warranty does not apply None the less I trust it so it is still better than nothing. On a side note I have all my equipment with EU plugs so it's quite ok for me but with the new equipment bought in CH problems starts...
Regarding your fire insurance, they may cover it. Especially since, such things are out of the norm and never occur in such a highly developed country.
I thought the eca was a national thing so you have an equivalent in the German sector surely ?
Eca are not being unreasonable. An electrician should say whether the pc's are toast because of a surge in which case eca will pay you all costs including that report. Otherwise you could be making it up as you go along.
not exactly the same, but when our phone line was hit by lightening and blew everyone in the villages swisscom boxes up, swisscom charged us for the callout (even though they knew the issue) and charged us for the replacement box, and told us to claim on our insurance. Swiss service at its best
For bulk distribution, this is of course correct. For local distribution, a neutral is derived from the center tap of a star transformer.
Let us assume from the picture below a simplified case that there is a 230 volt, 2.2 KW kettle between Secondary Phase L1 and Neutral and a 230 Volt 50W Mac computer between Secondary Phase L2 and Neutral. That all works perfectly. However, if the Neutral line breaks ( may be a bagger cuts through a Neutral cable somewhere), suddenly between Phase L1 and L2 there is a 2.2KW device in series with a 50 Watt device which is very bad news for the 50 Watt device (in this case the Mac computer).
For the OP, of course, the issue is: is it possible for a "an accident while working on a road" to cause an over voltage on his electrical equipment. I vote yes.
Apparently you do. It's a building insurance for owners rather than tenants so if you're renting you would have no reason to know of it's existence unless you had a building related problem.