Jim, Just to clarify, we are NOT trying to regulate the voltage. Just moniotor if the House AC is stable and within "tolerance". If brown outs are common it needs to be logged (even though it does NOT effect the performance of the device). Also a low A/C voltage may not be providing enough to charge the backup battery. Therefore none of this is part of the control circuitry, but rather more of a crude A/C voltmeter. In terms of "how cheap", the company eliminated even low cost items such items as "berg header" type jumpers (less than 1 penny apiece!). Also by the time it was realized (I am a software consultant to the client on this project and was NOT responsible for the hardware design) that this was an issue, the boards had already been layed-out (and about 150 of them assembled EVEN before a single line of software was written) for the 1000 piece pre-production run. David