[Today’s run: two miles]
I recently bought another GSA auction item. It is a 42 inch Pelco monitor. I imposed on my relatives to pick it up for me, and I recently had a visit and some kind folks dropped it off.
We plugged it in and, sure enough, it does not work. The red “power” light will sometimes come on, sometimes not.
I was able to get the back cover off without any trouble. It looks like some of the electrolytic capacitors are bad. I have ordered some replacements.
Electrolytic capacitors are frequently used in power supplies. A few years ago there was something called the Capacitor Plague. The story is that one or more factories in Taiwan tried to produce cheaper capacitors using a formula that they possibly had stolen from the Japanese. And they were less then successful. So the capacitors would work for awhile then fail, sometimes blowing up.
I don’t think these are directly the same problem, but I can’t really say. All I can say is that they are bulgy and need to be replaced.
In the picture I have circled the bad ones. You can kind of tell that their shiny tops look rounded or multi-faceted. The good ones have a perfectly flat top. The manufacturers of all such capacitors put a crease ‘X’ in the top of each one so that they can bulge instead of splitting open. That keeps the guts from oozing out and making a mess on the circuit board.
The fix is to buy similar capacitors and use a soldering gun to take the old ones out and put in the new ones. The new capacitors are about 75 cents each.
