During the winter months, there are always more dead computers coming into our shop for repair. This is in direct correlation with the use of electric space heaters near computers, which is quite common. After all, to keep your entire home or office a bit cooler and then to run a small space heater near your computer work area is an effective way to save some money on heat.

Unfortunately, however, that space heater can cause a lot of damage to your computer, and not in the way the warning label states. That is, of course you should leave plenty of ‘breathing room’ around the electric heater as a fire safety measure, and a space heater physically close to a computer could cause it to heat up and maybe start a fire.

What the warning label on the space heater does not tell you is that it draws a significant amount of power and usually causes temporary power drops, or ‘brown outs’, often evidenced by lights on the same circuit going dimmer for a second. With space heaters, this happens most frequently when it first turns on and when it is cycling off and on to maintain a certain temperature. It also makes the circuit it is on more prone to blowing a circuit breaker or fuse, creating a sudden loss of power. Both of these electrical power related events are detrimental to your computer.

The symptoms are as follows:

  • I tried to turn on my computer, but it does nothing.
  • When I plug in my computer, some lights come on but it does not power up.
  • When I turn my computer on, some fans start running, but it does not do anything else.
  • My computer does not boot anymore.
  • My computer seems to be trying to boot up, but nothing comes up on the screen.
  • My computer just shows a blue screen with white text (a.k.a. blue screen of death) when trying to boot it up.

There are other symptoms as well, but these are the main ones. Typically, power events can cause your computer’s internal power supply to get fried, file system and data corruption, main system board (motherboard) problems, and in more extreme cases, your computer may even start smoking, in which case it should be unplugged immediately because it is ‘melting down’ , going through what may develop very quickly into an electrical fire, fueled initially by the power running into it.

The motherboard problems are usually in the form of blown or partially blown capacitors, which are basically little cylinders attached to the circuit board which have flat or inset tops and function as miniature power regulators for the different components of the circuit board. When they are blown, the flat tops get pushed up a bit and may leak chemicals and become discolored.

In order to prevent space heaters from causing damage to your computer, you should never have the computer plugged into the same circuit as an electric heater, and the heater especially should not be plugged into the same power strip or surge protector as your computer.