Power Outages and Your Computer and Related Equipment

Late last year late one night I had a power outage. It was not a common area outage, or caused by an event such as a storm – mine was the only property impacted. It was repaired the next morning; it seemed to me that the cause was old cables which you think Energy Australia would monitor as part of any ongoing maintenance of infrastructure program. There was no explanation from Energy Australia other than the fault external to my property was repaired and my electricity was back on and my appliances all connected.

The problem was that the outage had blown two pieces of equipment a Netcomm ADSL Router as well as a Netgear Rangemax Wireless Router . I contacted Energy Australia and they advised that I must complete a Network Investigation Report for any compensation claim. I immediately did so. Several weeks later although Energy Australia had advised a far earlier response I received a form letter stating that myclaim had been rejected without any explanation.

Although my equipment is connected via an Anti-Surge Power Board, this still not on this occasion stop the problem and through no fault of my own I was up for a few hundred dollars to replace my ruined equipment.

It should be noted that occurrences like this may be covered under your Home Contents Insurance as long as part of your policy includes Fusion cover.

In conclusion all your equipment should be connected using a Surge Board, and you should look at your current insurance cover.

Although, these things are not in my experience regular events, they still do happen. It is my considered opinion that companies like Energy Australia should compensate customers when such events occur. People pay a high enough and in future increasing tariff for electricity and should be entitled to a reliable level of service and if something goes wrong to pay any cost associated with in this example affected equipment.