P500 damage?

Power Components
1

Yesterday evening, our house power flickered on and off about 5 or 6 times over about a 2-second period. Our power is absurdly inconsistent and often goes out without any apparent cause, but this was the first time I recall it ever hovering on the edge for that long. Still, it’s bad enough that a few years ago we invested in a whole-house surge protector. Prior to that we’d had to replace our well pump CPU control panel, twice.

Anyway, when this happened, I immediately ran down to the listening room where everything had been left on. The P500 was showing “HOT” in its display, something I had never seen before, so I shut everything down as quickly as I could.

On rising this morning, I went down and powered the system back up, and everything seems to be working - all components are getting power and are operating normally, the P500 is back to its “AUTO” display, and the sound of the system seems unchanged, or at least as much as I could tell from low-level 5:30 AM volumes.

But as I turned off the music to leave the room, I heard a buzzing I hadn’t ever heard before, faint, but definitely audible, and as near as I can tell, it seemed to be coming from the P500. I’m not talking about an electronic hum from the speakers, but a low-level mechanical hum or buzz like a fluorescent light ballast in another room. I should say it’s possible this noise was there before, but it seems unlikely that I wouldn’t have noticed it at all in the years I’ve been using the device. Since I had to leave for work, I shut everything down again. I wasn’t about to leave it on with no one on hand to monitor things.

I guess my question, for those who know the P500 and electronics better than I (which wouldn’t take much), does this sound like something that could be caused by a second or two of rapid on/off line voltage cycling, and if so, is it something to worry about?

2

Depending what the power was doing during the on and off cycles, it was likely complete junk feeding the P500. If this was the case, the unit would have been doing overtime to correct it. With it working harder, it will have gotten a lot hotter. I’m really just speculating here. I would keep a close eye on it to see if it does this again.

3

Thanks, James, I’ll definitely keep an eye on it, but my bigger question was regarding the buzz or humming I’m hearing now. Is that what you might think is an expected result of the the power company anomalies? I guess what I’m wondering is if 1) there’s anything in the unit that could be damaged by that kind of rapid cycling, and 2) if so, is a mechanical buzz or hum the kind of symptom one might expect from something like that?

4

My experience with the P500 is pretty limited. I’m sure that depending if a big surge came through, it could have hurt something in the protection circuitry. The weird thing though is I wouldn’t expect it to continue to work properly if that happened. I don’t want to speculate too much. I’d give our tech support guys a buzz when you can. TJ will know a bit more than I do.

5

I didn’t get a chance to do any listening last night, but early this morning I powered everything up again and listened, and it all sounded great - and no hint of that buzz/hum, or any overheating. Just to be safe I shut it down again before leaving for work. But for now, things seem to have returned to normal, and I might be able to stop trying to figure out how to afford a P3. :wink:

Of course, if we follow Calvin Trillin’s “Alice’s Law of Compensatory Cash Flow” (his wife’s notion that if you consider buying something, no matter how briefly, and then don’t do it, that money is available to be spent freely on other things), maybe I can look into an S300 instead. :smile: