Volt meters are a cheap device that can be had from home depot or fry's. With them one can verify what the service actually is. High voltage as well as low voltage can damage your appliances. In the past Palo Alto has supplied my neighbourhood with high voltage on one side of the street and low voltage on the other side of the street. You might want to check. When it used to happen to us, I pulled my main breaker until they fixed the problem. This used to happen about once a year until they did a large upgrade in our area that seems to have stopped the problem. Without measuring with a meter, you probably can't tell if it was high before and they fixed it, or it is low now and its a problem.

You might be able to get the utility company to come by and test the service for you, if you are uncomfortable with the idea of testing the service yourself. Give them a call.

Good luck.

Our power has been out twice recently. The first time a transformer went, the second time it was a fuse. Don't feel bad we'er all experiencing outages; that's why our City Council keeps voting for these huge rate hikes!!!!