Power supply stabilizer or inverter for use of European laptops in Laos?
Alternative title : does your electronic devices have suffered of voltage surges or other Lao RPD electricity network specificities ?
While traveling in Laos, I daily use a laptop that was bought in Europe. As I am working while travelling, I need to protect my device because it allows me to maintain my company websites. Without it, I will go back to home. I encounter some strange behaviors (recurrent freezes needing hard reboot, happening only when at home, not at the internet café), just like if the stuff was old (hard drive failure ?), but it has only six months.
Is it necessary to plug the power supply on a stabilizer or inverter? I've seen in an internet café in Luang Prabang that every computer were plugged on a stabilizer.
Is there some special things I should care for the health of the machine (for example it is supposed to receive 220 volts electricity, that is converted to 12 volts, maybe electricity is 110 here and the devices don't like it)? Does the inverters I've seen are used in case of total electricity network breakdown or is it supposed to also protect the electronic devices from "up and downs" ?
Edit : I know that electricity is 220V / 50Hz in Laos,the same than in France, where the laptop come from. But my knowledge about electricity is tiny, I don't understand some technical stuff.
Edit2 : some people from computers shops told me it was hugely recommended to protect my machine from voltage surges and that they already have repaired tourists devices
Best Answer
Summary: A suitably good spike filter between your laptop power supply and the mains and a functioning battery in your laptop should work well enough in most cases.
What do I know?: I'm a long in the tooth electrical engineer which lots of general experience in electronics and power.
Detail:
You laptop has an AC to DC power supply which charges the laptop battery and which can (usually) also operate the laptop directly. This power supply is an AC to DC converter in its own right.
If people use UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) successfully and they survive the power conditions then it should be possible to provide a "front end" filter that similarly protects your laptop power supply. A laptop PSU + battery IS a UPS.
If the battery is not dead than your laptop should be able to run on internal battery independent of mains. If it can, then if mains adversely affects operation it suggests that mains spikes or the effects of brownouts are "riding through" your laptop's power supply into the laptop.
At a minimum you need a good quality surge suppressor and line filter - usually sold as a combined unit. This arrangement absorbs spikes (rapid very short duration voltage peaks) and reduces the effect of surges and dips (sudden changes in voltage caused by load changes and operation of machinery that grossly overloads mains capacity).
You say that the Laotian mains voltage is ~= 230 VAC. Having a "universal" laptop power supply which can operate from eg 90 VAC up to 240 VAC gives more chance of it working OK in low voltage conditions. Most but not all modern laptop supplies are "universal input".
"Brownouts" (where the power drops to an unusably low voltage for tenths of seconds to seconds) are harder to deal with well as you then need to provide energy while the mains is not providing it. Your laptop battery should do this during a brownout. In some very extreme cases where voltages vary widely and rapidly over a long while some devices may be damaged, but this usually is applicable to eg electric motors which cannot run up to proper operating speed, and a laptop power supply should be OK.
I have found that using a 1:1 isolating transformer (eg 230:230 or 110:110) can help improve waveforms from some sources, but you should not need to do this.
As a first step I'd expect a good quality imput filter and surge suppressor to help.
Some examples of mais filter circuits and commercial devices shown. A product should have at least 'some' inductors in it and having more than less is usually but not always a sign that the product should do an OK job. ie cheap junk will usually do the minimum needed to look good.
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Answer 2
The laptop as already a converter, it's the box you have within the power cord.
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Images: Pok Rie, Brett Sayles, Karolina Grabowska, Brett Sayles