Re:Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-wee...
by nradov on Friday March 13, 2026 @11:16PM
(#47372965)
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.
Re:Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-wee...
by kelnos on Saturday March 14, 2026 @05:43AM
(#47374949)
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.
Re:Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-wee...
by jcalvinowens on Saturday March 14, 2026 @10:56AM
(#47377327)
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.
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).