The hum/buzz is gone

[Killcrop]

Where I keep most of my guitars is a room where there are a couple computers running all the time. The buzz is annoying and has always been there. This morning I moved my Princeton to the living room and was noodling around with my Tele and noticed it was almost totally silent in all positions. I recently had it setup and I started to wonder if my tech did something magical. So I plugged my Strat in, that is usually so noisy I don't bother to play it, and zero noise.

So what is going on? Perhaps many of you have experienced this before but I have never had an outlet with such low noise. How can I replicate this all over the world?

 

[vashondan]

I realized recently that even charging my phone through my computer near my guitar and amp created noise. Also, you can get an outlet tester to make sure each is wired correctly. I had a couple in my house that I couldn't plug into.

 

[Multicellular]

A power conditioner might help, but your interference might be coming in somewhere else. E.g. I had a renovation done and I asked for no dimmer switches...they put em in anyway, but I was kinda over having them in the house. Plan to rewire them sometime myself.

But I noticed that the stuff plugged into the power conditioners are unaffected by the dimmers. However, I still get cell phone noise.

 

[therealjoeblow]

Could be a number of things causing interference... I've run into these myself:

- Close proximity to the "main run" of electrical feeds from my panel to various other parts of the house (there are about 20 14/2 cables that run in a joist bay in the basement before branching off. If the amps are above or below that, they get some buzz. Move them away a few feet in a perpendicular direction and they are fine.

- Same thing with the main electrical panel itself.

- Close proximity to dimmers, or lights and cables on dimmer circuits, as noted already by @Multicellular.

- Close proximity to CFL bulbs.

I do NOT seem to have any problems with computers, I have 2 Peavey Bandits in a room that has 4 computers running 24/7 literally 4' away from the amps, and they are pretty dead silent.

I do find though that sometimes the proximity of the interference can be baffling to find... for example, my JCM2000 was intermittently buzzy as hell, and I couldn't figure out why until one night some weeks later when I was sitting in the livingroom in the evening, exactly right above my amp that is in the basement, and the timer turned on the light, at which point I was annoyed by the ugly off-color of the CFL bulb in it, and the "light bulb" in my head immediately turned on, making me realize this was the problem. I replaced the light bulb with an old-school incandescent and the buzz is no more.

Cheers
TRJB