Power Surge and Rescue

So the other day I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, when all the sudden we had this HUGE ol' power surge. I never witnessed one of those before, but it was kinda scary. I thought our whole apartment was going to blow up. Anyway, it is a miracle my laptop lived through the whole thing, considering it was plugged in at the time. The power surge blew our surge protector, and it also ruined our speaker system. It blew something in the amp. Now, we got our speaker system for free from PC recyclers back when Bryce worked there... but this is a really nice system that is worth $300 new. Needless to say, even though we weren't really out much since it was free, we were still bummed.

Anyway, Bryce took the amp apart, looked over it, and found a piece that he could replace. It looked like this. He thought it was a capacitor, but it is actually a varistor. Varistors are pretty much there to blow up when there is a power surge to save the rest of your circuit. SO ya! It did its job!

So we biked over to Radio Shack, bought a new $2.50 varistor, and saved our speaker system! Yay! Here is Bryce fixing it.

And if you can see that small blue circular piece in there... that is our new varistor that saved our speaker system! Technology is super cool.... especially when you have a husband that knows all about it :)