Unintended Consequences

You can call it Murphy’s Law if you want, but whatever you call it, the Law of Unintended Consequences may be the most prevalent and unyielding force in the universe.

We got a couple of reminders of that in the past few days – both of them having to do with our new Genie DVR.

First, we learned that the on-air tuner that I bought back in 2012 to use with our DVR would not work with the new one.  The tuner attached to the DVR via a USB cable and the Genie does not have a USB port.  I really liked the convenience of being able to scroll and select on-air channels through the DVR, especially when bad weather caused the loss of satellite signals, but it ain’t the end of the world. I was able to connect the antenna directly to the TV.  That doesn’t give us the guide function, but we can switch to the on-air channels, scroll and select using the same remote with only one extra step.

Our second “gotcha” came yesterday.  Severe thunderstorms in association with a front knocked out power in our area for about six hours.  Our generator came on like it is supposed to and everything was fine except…..

When the power fails, the DVR loses connection and has to go through a complete diagnostic and setup when it reboots.  This takes several minutes and can be extremely annoying when it happens at the end of a show or the last few minutes of a football game.  To avoid this, I recently bought and installed a UPS battery backup to power the DVR and TV.

Yesterday, the UPS worked as advertised and the DVR continued to function without a hitch.  Then the alarm on the UPS started beeping. 

Every few minutes, the alarm would give a series of eight loud irritating beeps.  A check with the manufacturer’s tech support told me that

1. The UPS is extremely frequency sensitive
2. The eight beep series indicates a frequency deviation
3. No, the alarm can not be deactivated

I have suspected that our generator ran slightly less than 60 cycles per second since over several hours our clocks will lose a couple minutes, but it has always run everything in the house without a problem. 

We’ve decided that the beeps are going to be more annoying than the wait for the DVR to reset, so it looks like the UPS is on its way out.