Until it started happening I always assumed it'd be powered by a central computer I had in a clean area of the attic or something. Not some DC somewhere.
When I heard about this long ago, I assumed it was just a mechanism they used to remotely monitor some equipment was still running without having to have staff on premises there. Probably remotely detecting power outage or damage was precisely what this is sort of thing was for.
My dad built one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iad37q9kNPk and we spent a lot of time looking at our house power and trying to figure out where recurring patterns came from. Back in the early 70s, refrigerators and air conditioners (things with high-load motors running intermittently) were often the culprit.
He built a bunch of Heathkit products. We had an intercom system that worked over the power wiring. It quit working before I was clever enough to use it to play jokes on my little sister.
Before I looked at the details, I thought it was electromagnetically driven. Combine that with a power outage, and you’re hunting for little steel balls on the floor. But at least you’d know when the power went out, based on which ones are missing from the base.
Fascinating, I never knew this is how it worked. I feel like I've run into this before at friends or family's houses and shrugged it off as bad house wiring or the like.
A few winters ago, I had walked across my floor, and unplugged something. I discharged some static into the screw that holds the outlet's faceplate, and my nearby desktop PC woke up. It wasn't plugged into that outlet, but it must be on the same circuit. I've haven't been able to reproduce.
Probably more a power quality issue. It is amazing how inconsistent the flow of power is in most people's homes. In large because it didn't need to be consistent in the past.
That seems crazy but plausible. Explains why so many people complain about it while my office and home never had issues, it's all laid out so you plug in the power on the right.
I swear to god I was going crazy trying to find why I randomly tripped the circuit breaker at my house. I never made the connection that it actually happens when I try to print something. Enshittification indeed.
Similar situation here. A big red button on the wall in the basement data center - nobody knew what it was for and were afraid to turn it off. One day a night operator decided he was going to flip the switch and see what happened. It cut power to the entire datacenter, including the elevator systems. We spent a few days getting all the systems back online.
Had another instance where a pipe ran from the floor above right over the UPS. Construction workers on the first floor decided to poor some unusued paint into it (figured it was a drain pipe) and of course, we lost power again.
I mean it actually happens. Not powering down the actual machine, but in my last house the landlord had a cleaner visit every fortnight. Occasionally I came home to find downloads broken or my remote connection would drop randomly in the afternoon. We lived in an old house and had a wifi extender to reach the upper floors (and not enough sockets). The cleaner would unplug the extender to vacuum the kitchen and half the house would go offline.
The ice cream story reads too much like a dramatisation to be truly believable, but accidental and repeated unplugging is common I expect.
Recently my TV has been turning itself on at night. I looked at the settings on my Kodi box and realized the CEC settings could be doing it, so I disabled power management over CEC and rebooted.
It's still doing it. Did it last night. My wife thinks it's ghosts, but she's Irish, so.... :-D And our house is nearly 200 years old, so if some poor bastard didn't die here at some point I'd be frankly shocked.
Very true - To be honest at the point I knew the house consumption and hadn't yet clamped individual devices I had expected to find a single culprit like that, or even a faulty device with earth leakage that was affectively dumping the current for no real purpose.
I should have also pointed out, I really do wish more devices would have more physical power switches where it makes sense - As an example the washing machine has a touch sensitive main power button, yet our tumble dryer (same manufacture & design) has a more physical on/off switch - The former uses a decent amount of standby power, the second uses none, the only real purpose I see is a slightly more "premium" feel to the washing machine.
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