Dirty power is a real concern in the power industry, which is why power analyzers exist:
http://www.fluke.com/products/view/home.asp?SID=12&AGID=3&PID=5177
The article makes no mention as to whether or not a power anlyzer was used to see if the power was dirty in the first place. There were a few studies done but no one seems to have bothered to measure the line noise before and after the tests. Without these measurements, these experiments are only good for demonstrating the placebo effect.
The symptoms given are the usual non-specific laundry list of complaints. Any time you see 'memory loss', your B.S. detector should go off. There are lots of people who work with huge amounts of EMI on a regular basis. There should be an epidemic of problems within the power industry. Those people work near lines that carry many hundreds or even thousands of volts. Are there any studies that show people who work around high voltages have a lot of health problems? I should mention that the CRT in your computer or TV set is running at 1000 volts or so...
The power conditioner reduces noise (electromagnetic interferance, or EMI) that is called conducted EMI and is different from radiated EMI that you get from cell phones, wireless modems, etc. The power conditioners do nothing about radiated EMI so it is useless to mention them in the article. Nothing can stop radiated EMI except for a properly grounded tinfoil hat.
The conditioners also do nothing about conducted EMI that is generated within equipment that is connected to the output of the conditioner. This also means that the fluorescent lights that guy was using did not stop radiating EMI just because he was running them from a clean power supply. This means the school still could have had dirty power even when running from the conditioner. The only way to guarantee clean power is to plug each piece of equipment into its own power conditioner outlet.
Reading the article, I thought this was strange:
[This deterioration in power quality has been going on for years and would have likely escaped public notice, except that when home computers became popular in the 1990s they would frequently crash or malfunction because of it.]
I've never heard of that one before. In fact, computer power supplies are very resistant to line noise. They use a switching power supply which can operate with a large variation of line voltage. The line voltage should be 120V in the U.S., but your computer should run fine with between 90V and 130V. The switching supply itself generates noise so it uses filters on the input to keep the noise from getting back into the house wiring. The output of the supply is also well-filtered to keep switching noise out of the computer's DC power. I have never heard of computers crashing because of bad power, but I recall that the Apple IIe computers would start to crash if the room temperature got too high. CPUs didn't have fans until late in the 90's, so maybe that's why computers were crashing. In any case, running Windows back then was a good way to make sure your computer would crash.
I looked for Kevin Byrne's website but I can't find it.
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