Fixing a loud PSU fan without dying(chameth.com) |
Fixing a loud PSU fan without dying(chameth.com) |
> I looked at Cooler Master’s warranty, and for issues within the first two years you have to deal with the retailer. That would be Amazon in my case. So I looked at Amazon’s information on warranty issues. Their policy is that if it’s more than 30 days since purchase, you have to send it off to a third-party repair center and wait for them to diagnose and try to repair it. Here’s the kicker: Usually repairs take up to 20 business days (including delivery time), but could take slightly longer
Everyone knows electronic devices tend to die early or last forever. Cooler Master and Amazon are working a shitty dodge here, and I bet they avoid most DOA warranty claims because of it.
Tried to deal with the manufacturer, but they couldn’t help and sent me to the retailer.
Went to the store, popped it up on the counter, had a short conversation and got the expected “you have to deal with the manufacturer”.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Actually yes. Can you throw that out for me?
The confusion on the guy’s face was great.
Spent more than enough time on the $100 microwave. Their problem now.
- You have a 14 days retraction period, where you can send back the item and get your money back, defect or not. Amazon gives you 30 days and free return shipping.
- Legal warranty is 2 years and is provided by the seller, not the manufacturer. It is Amazon in this case, but it could be a brick and mortar shop or any other seller, including independent sellers. And they have to solve your problem within 30 days (repair, refund, replacement, ...). How to deal with the manufacturer is their problem. Amazon here is perfectly in line with the law.
- Manufacturer warranty and commercial warranty comes in addition to the legal warranty is whatever is written in the contract.
So here, the manufacturer doesn't need to provide warranty directly to the consumer for the first 2 years as the legal warranty covers it. And I am pretty sure that the 8 extra years offered by Cooler Master are even worse than what Amazon offers. For example, they may require you to pay for return shipping and wait even longer. There may be some fine print there too.
However it's on the seller to prove it was not a production defect if they don't want to fix or refund.
Back when CD burners kept getting faster and faster my buddy bought a 4x writer and ended up with a 52x writer as they kept breaking down after 12-18 months. IIRC he went through four or five before getting the 52x which lasted.
It helps prevent ewaste.
Other less prominent vendors often do make easier drop in fans, that often have very good lifespans that might be easier to adapt than Noctua. Sanyo Denki fans easily will long outlive even Noctua (but don't typically play in the retail space); Delta and Dynatron also usually sell at least decent parts that are much better than whatever random chinesium fans lots of stuff come with. All of the above have much more variety in the profile of fan sizes and configurations and I would probably be looking through their parts catalogs to see if they don't have something that's a better fit (they often do).
The only other interesting thing is that I have picked up is soldering seems like a good idea in cases like this, but at least in bigger setups I've seen solder joints fail because of vibration. Maybe not an issue here, but crimping is usually a much better solution for connecting things that need to have a long life and might be vibrating like something attached to a fan.
It's kindof a gimmick because it's easy to forget you have it, but if you have it, use it.
CRTs were dangerous because they used extremely high voltages (often as high as 25 kV), and that voltage was often present on the CRT itself, which acted as a capacitor. The capacitance of the CRT was relatively low, but it still stored enough energy to be very hazardous. There's ways to safely discharge them, but you absolutely need to know what you're doing and work with one hand behind your back.
The voltages in a modern switching power supply are much lower (typically no more than ~1.5x line voltage ≈ 180V), and the capacitors usually have "bleeder" resistors which will discharge them to safe voltages within a few seconds. I'd still give one a few minutes before touching it - and maybe check one or two of the bigger capacitors with a multimeter - but it's still much less dangerous.
The G1 Noctua fans don't, I have a 120mm still in my case that is a decade or so old and it starts at a bit under 7V, but all the G2 140mm will start at 5V IIRC the Noctua presentations on this. Wish it was laid out in the specifications however.
One day at Fry's Electronics I found they sold external scsi cases. So I bought a case and a cheaper bare scsi drive and hooked it to my sun.
The fan was quieter too!
and after a few months, the fan started getting louder. and louder. and then one day when the drive seemed to stop responding, I found it had failed.
sun fans were annoyingly loud, but they had one interesting property: THEY ALWAYS SPUN.
PSUs are probably the only piece of Hardware, i DO NOT fiddle around with, not even for saving lots of money or time.
PSU Capacitors are no joke, especially in (older) TVs. However, I expected more like an instruction manual why PSUs are dangerous and how to properly discharge capacitors before taking them apart less than how to replace a fan although it's dangerous and getting away with it with a simple hint to not touch the capacitors (no offense).
BTW I would recommend to use electrical tape and shrink tube instead of simple adhesive tape (as it looks in the pictures) to prevent lose cables touching the spinning fan.
I guess if you know electronics and how to safely handle the PSU internals, the risk of injury is low, but I personally would not risk it for EUR 100.
Also, if the only problem was the noisy fan, I guess selling it used would have returned most of the investment, leaving him with like EUR 50 in added cost. Compared to the price of a modern gaming PC, that's nothing (also avoiding not risking your life).
it's not bad advice but it's worth noting that petroleum jelly is pretty thick compared to a machinists' oil or dry graphite.
So unless it is a weird fan I can't find elsewhere, now, I just buy a new one.
Also if it came packed with graphite or something else exotic none of the above applies and doing the above can burn a motor out.
It's sometimes uneconomical from a cost-ratio perspective, but it is crucial to making datacenter-grade equipment actually useable at home.
I replaced all 4 of them with Noctua NF-A4x20s, wired to run at full speed all the time. They still report their speed so the IPMI management interface doesn't consider the power supply fan to have failed, but the PSU can no longer control the fan's speed.
The PSUs don't run any hotter and I can't hear them now.
I have a used Eaton PW9130 UPS in the bottom of the rack. The 80mm (exhaust) and 60mm (inverter heatsink) fans were likewise louder than I'd like. I replaced them with Noctuas too, again wired to run at full speed all the time, and the UPS' Web/SNMP card confirms it's still no hotter than 30'C internally. I can't hear that now either.
Hilariously, the most critical fan, the original inverter heatsink fan, is a 2-pin fan, so it probably can't even detect when it has failed (unless it's detecting fan failure by monitoring current consumption). The original rear exhaust fan uses a locked rotor sensor rather than a tachometer, which required a bit of bodging to convince the UPS that it has not failed. Oh well.
The danger isn't so much in the fan, but in that the fan is INSIDE OF A COMPUTER PSU. There are mains AC voltages (220V, or 110V) here, and even if unplugged (which is should be) there are also capacitors in there, which you should definitely be cautious of.
I've worked in DC (datacenters) before - and I've seen people accidentally drop screws into power supplies...and well, electrical arc, boom, you can guess the rest. And in a domestic situation, a 4" cooling fan (yes, I know, larger) stopped suddenly due to a motor issue, and send flying bits of plastic shrapnel around (always wear eye protection!).
This isn't quite like tinkering with your little Arduino board, or Raspberry Pi.
If you did read the article =(.... I think that's a bit arrogant and disingenuous to make fun of people saying you should be cautious around things that are connected to AC mains, or that involve capacitors.
There is no way of easily changing this bulb (inside the main casing with no access panel for the bulb) so for want of a single in-line fuse, the entire microwave was rendered scrap[0] by the lifetime of a light bulb.
[0] - Except for the fact that I care not for electrical safety "DO NOT OPEN" warnings of doom due to being actually competent with handling high voltage equipment and being able to do a board level repair on the burned out trace without touching the very large capacitors associated with the very high voltage side controlling the magnetron...
Taking standard precautions doesn't mean you suddenly shy away from doing basic maintenance. You can use iso alcohol to clean things even if its flammable, just don't use an open flame at the same time.
Are we talking like, bad electrical shock, hospitalization, death, etc?
really wish arctic would now focus on the acoustics of their fans because its there weakest point. i wouldnt mind spending a bit more per fan if the sound profile wasnt just straight terrible which personally theirs are to me at the moment
WD-40 is a lubricant. The WD-40 company says it is [1], the Wikipedia article says it is, attempts to reverse-engineer the (secret) formula have found compounds typically used as lubricants and it is rather obvious to anyone who has used it.
It is the best lubricant for you application? Probably not, and that includes fans. It is probably not the best at anything unless you have an Atlas missile lying around. It is not the best lubricant, penetrating oil, water displacer, rust protector, etc... but it does all of it to some extent, and it is cheap and convenient.
Anyways, thank you for the suggestion of using gear oil, I didn't try this one and it sounds like a good candidate. I don't have marine grease but what I understand is that it is similar to basic lithium grease but formulated to resist the harsh marine environment (so maybe with some corrosion inhibitors).
Marine bearing and chassis grease is really different than white lithium grease. Lithium grease in general probably isn't advisable on a fan the more I think about it as it tends to destroy plastic and rubber. On a real bearing like a wheel bearing even a thin coat of high pressure grease like synthetic marine grease is going to outperform basically everything else (unless you've got an oil pump involved), and again would be the first thing I'd try and pack a bearing of rotating assembly with hands down. t's probably cheaper or about the same if you go pick up something like a tub of Supertech synthetic marine. I'm sure if you go ask somewhere like BobIsTheOilGuy forums someone there will be able to point to an optimal solution.
Is there? This kind of statement has the potential to exhibit survivorship bias, but I feel like the opposite—"12-year-old dies replacing a power supply fan"—would make headlines. Definitely haven't seen that.
Capacitors should be respected for sure, but people don't routinely die in DIY electronics tasks.
I had to sit down in a quiet room for the rest of the work day, before I could function again. It was probably 13 kV, which was typical for monochrome displays back in the day.
Also, anything in a CRT television can kill you because TV's tended to have a "hot" chassis. The repairmen always plugged a TV into an isolation transformer so they could ground its chassis while working on it. There's a lot of counterintuitive things about those old electronics due to clever cost reductions.
We had a procedure for discharging it, which I must have bungled.
[1] a quick search mentions things like damaged cords, the classic metal object into the outlet, etc. I installed tamper-resistant outlets everywhere in my house to prevent the latter as part of child-proofing. I think they're mandatory now in new construction. I also may have gone a bit overboard trying to instill caution in my children about this this particular risk; my son tonight asked me if he was okay after his sleeve brushed against the metal part of a USB-C connector while he was plugging in his tablet.