When the power conditioner fails without a bang

[chrisc]

A drawback of recent living in South Africa is the prevalance of AC power failures, caused by load shedding necessitated by the national electricity supplier being unable to supply the current required by the whole country. 

Mainly due to inadequate or no maintenance of the infrastructure and corruption in the electricity management company

Anyway, when the power comes back on it is sometimes not a clean switch-on, but on-off-on-off-on.   Many people have installed delay-on timers to circumvent this

I thought this was not necessary, since the power conditioner I was using has a switch-on delay.  Apparently not good enough I found.  One day when I came back home and the power had come back when I was out, I detected an acrid smell coming from my listening room.   The Ashley-Edison VR5000F power conditioner had overheated and was emitting smoke

That was the end of this unit.  Fortunately no damage to peripherals attached

So at the moment I am using a Furman unit.  And to my amazement the sound is fuller, better dynamics and (since we have a lockdown in place and its very quiet with no traffic) the noise floor is reduced.

In addition, I replaced the suppressor plug attached to the dedicated wall plug

The insurance is paying 80% of the cost of the power conditioner, which I bought in England for £390 a year or two ago