Power generator can harm amps,etc?

[Len Amaral]

Last night I played an outdoor festival where a power generator was used to supply AC to the stage. I chatted with the steel player from the band that played the afternoon segment and he said the tech person measured 165 volts to the stage AC box and supposedly it was stepped down to 125 volts.

This steel player did not feel comfortable with the situation but he made it through the gig OK. I was not so lucky as my Peavey DPC 1400 stereo power amp blew out one side and all the equipment sounded "fuzzy".

You think this was just a fluke or did the power generator cause this to happen?

[Brad Sarno]

Some generators can put out all kinds of junk. It's good to have a power conditioner/surge suppressor in that case. But, when the voltages get that high, many conditioners can't do much about it.

Brad Sarno

[Ray Minich]

Running off a generator that you know nothing about is risky business. Under these circumstances you could be getting a weird waveform as well as weird voltages. If you dont at least have a way to confirm that the voltage is not over 125 volts at your plug then bad things can happen. I spent some time a few years ago evaluating generators for use by natural gas utility crews. There are lots of oddball things that can happen and when they rate a generator at 3000 watts that's usually into 3000 watts of lightbulbs, not transformers or other inductive loads. If possible, make sure the generator has lots of copper in its windings.

Gotta tell ya we found them Honda generators to be really nice though. They met the specs they published and ran good too.

[Len Amaral]

Thanks for the replys. I swapped out the defective power amp with another DPC-1400 and my rack is up and running again. I will besending the unit that needs repair back to peavey.