hamish225: im in christchurch, when our power has gone out due to earthquakes and come back on hours or days later we never bothered turning the circuit breakers off, everything turned back on at once and nothing ever blew up.
i do have surge protectors on everything in my room though, computer, heater, modem, switch, nas etc.
but at the time this was an adsl modem.
Disregarding what problems this may or may not cause to your own home and electronics, the lines weren't brought back to full capacity when they went back up and in fact Christchurch residents were asked multiple times through multiple media to limit their power use, and later to vary the times they used heavy loads such as cooking and heating. So the attitude of leaving everything plugged in and doing whatever you want is a tad lacking in character.
As for surge protectors, I've always been fairly wary of how effective they are. After the last storm I heard from my aunt in Little River, who came home from the local cafe where the surge protectors had blown up to find her own had also not survived, with at least one blown clear across the room leaving scorch marks on the outlet. This is of course a subjective story, relayed from one lay person to another.
Oh, and on to brownouts in Christchurch: are you sure it's supply, and not the house wiring? I lived for awhile in a house, with old wiring, where the brownouts were bad enough to turn my computer off several times a day. Even buying a UPS was annoying, because you could turn the alarm off when it tripped but some times it would constantly switch on and off, beeping every time. That's certainly not normal for Christchurch; except for after the quakes everywhere else I've lived has been stable, with maybe one brownout bad enough to restart the computer every two years.
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