Right on cue, to prove my point about laptops and short calendar life induced by heat, my data logger laptop upstairs chewed up and spat out it's 6 month old lithium ion battery pack this morning.
The machine has been running hot for some time, the fan whirring like mad but not blowing out much air. The poor machine is worked hard as it also records two CCTV cameras as well.
Then this morning, the battery LED on the machine was blinking orange. Uh, oh. Not good.
I pulled the DC cable out to see if the battery had any power and the machine fell over immediately. No good. No good.
Pulled the battery pack and it was hot in one spot, just where it was next to the heat sink assembly on the motherboard. The heat had evidently cooked one cell, ageing it. When things cooled down I tried again, but the pack was stone dead.
So it was screwdriver time for the laptop to find out why the thing was getting so hot. The fan was working but just not working well.
About 20 screws later, I'd got the thing into all it's bits and could lift out the motherboard with the integral heat sink and blower. I blew out the copper matrix exhaust with high pressure air and wads of fluff like candy floss came tumbling out of the intake. How did all that stuff get in there??? I half expected a small mammal to come out with all the nesting material that it looked like was in there!
Anyway, with that done and the 20 screws put back where they came from, the laptop runs cool and the fan just spins slowly without making the ineffectual roaring noise it did before. I salvaged a battery from another dead clone laptop and so we'll see how long this one lasts!
I only put a battery in the machine as a UPS so that I can swap the AC adaptor from solar to grid power without having to reboot the machine, abusing the battery for my convenience (like I said in the previous article :D ).
There you have it, a first hand example of "accelerated ageing" testing.
Showing posts with label Repair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Repair. Show all posts
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Dodgy Plastic Panels...
Hmmm... I'm glad I sold off most of the plastic framed amorphous panels. One of the two remaining ones broke the other day. It suddenly went open circuit. Rather than bin it, I decided to take it to bits to see how they were put together.
The black caps on the back hide a load of small screws that hold the thing together. Luckily, the sealant that was under the cover wasn't glue so I could easily take the back off of the panel. Under the silicone sealant on the positive lead, the end contact on the glass had broken off and the red wire came away with the sealant it was embedded in. This was possibly from thermal stress as I remember hearing the frames creaking in the sun and shade.
There was a thin stub of copper poking out from under the laminate. The panel seems to be made from a sandwich of two plates of glass (presumably with one having the amorphous cells evaporated on to it). I just about managed to solder a thin wire on to this and then joined it to a new thicker wire and potted the whole thing in silicone sealant again before screwing the back on. How long will it last? Who knows...
To save propping up the thing on a garden chair, I made up a rear leg, just fixed on with the usual brass hinge.
Now that it's getting darker in the days, it's actually better to have the amorphous panels at a shallow angle as they produce more power from just "seeing" more diffuse light from a bigger proportion of the sky than if you aim them at the non-existent Sun.
The black caps on the back hide a load of small screws that hold the thing together. Luckily, the sealant that was under the cover wasn't glue so I could easily take the back off of the panel. Under the silicone sealant on the positive lead, the end contact on the glass had broken off and the red wire came away with the sealant it was embedded in. This was possibly from thermal stress as I remember hearing the frames creaking in the sun and shade.
There was a thin stub of copper poking out from under the laminate. The panel seems to be made from a sandwich of two plates of glass (presumably with one having the amorphous cells evaporated on to it). I just about managed to solder a thin wire on to this and then joined it to a new thicker wire and potted the whole thing in silicone sealant again before screwing the back on. How long will it last? Who knows...
To save propping up the thing on a garden chair, I made up a rear leg, just fixed on with the usual brass hinge.
Now that it's getting darker in the days, it's actually better to have the amorphous panels at a shallow angle as they produce more power from just "seeing" more diffuse light from a bigger proportion of the sky than if you aim them at the non-existent Sun.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Saved From the Dustbin
In a move to reduce the power consumption of my "server" room upstairs, I replaced the XP desktop machine that was doing file serving, CCTV recording and mail filtering with a Vista laptop I picked up at a car boot sale for £20. It was a bit busted, the power supply was lost along with the battery, and the OS was trashed but as a server it doesn't need all the keys on the keyboard to work, doesn't need a battery as it will live exclusively on the mains and I found a matching power supply at the same car boot sale for £1. Best of all, the hidden recovery partition was still in tact on the hard disk so I could re-image the machine and now it works fine. It consumes a mere 25W of power compared to the 110W of the old desktop, greatly extending the time the server can run on solar power.
My wife's laptop recently expired from overheating - a design defect in the HP G60 series :( but the memory from it was compatible with the car boot machine so it now has the salvaged RAM from the dead HP.
The HP may yet live though. In the spirit of "make do and mend" to reduce the waste of throwing things away that can be fixed, I found a company that specialises in repairing the G60. It usually dies because the graphics processor had a poorly designed heat sink. It gets too hot and the the solder joints on the chip fail. The company resolders the chip on the motherboard and then fits a new customised copper heat sink and an upgraded BIOS that makes the fan run faster all the time to prevent the problem recurring.
The operation runs from a garage in Thatcham and I was shocked to be met at the door of an ordinary suburban house by a man in a white coat! He showed me the "lab" and the stack of machines awaiting repair along with a couple on soak test after being fixed. At £50, it will be an economic repair (if it works) and I'll have saved a machine from becoming unecessary land fill fodder. If it doesn't work, they only make a charge for return postage so I'll only have lost £10. I'll scavenge the hard disk for the new server (as the HP one is twice as big) and sell off the carcase to repairers who can use the LCD screen and plastic body parts to refurbish other G60's. There's a market for them on eBay...
"Waste not, want not..."
My wife's laptop recently expired from overheating - a design defect in the HP G60 series :( but the memory from it was compatible with the car boot machine so it now has the salvaged RAM from the dead HP.
The HP may yet live though. In the spirit of "make do and mend" to reduce the waste of throwing things away that can be fixed, I found a company that specialises in repairing the G60. It usually dies because the graphics processor had a poorly designed heat sink. It gets too hot and the the solder joints on the chip fail. The company resolders the chip on the motherboard and then fits a new customised copper heat sink and an upgraded BIOS that makes the fan run faster all the time to prevent the problem recurring.
The operation runs from a garage in Thatcham and I was shocked to be met at the door of an ordinary suburban house by a man in a white coat! He showed me the "lab" and the stack of machines awaiting repair along with a couple on soak test after being fixed. At £50, it will be an economic repair (if it works) and I'll have saved a machine from becoming unecessary land fill fodder. If it doesn't work, they only make a charge for return postage so I'll only have lost £10. I'll scavenge the hard disk for the new server (as the HP one is twice as big) and sell off the carcase to repairers who can use the LCD screen and plastic body parts to refurbish other G60's. There's a market for them on eBay...
"Waste not, want not..."
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