Resurrecting a power supply

Crypto

I've recently lost two PSUs and couldn't quite bear to chuck them out.

One was a Nexus 350W super silent or something, only about two years old. When I had a look inside, it had bulging and leaking capacitors.

I had a lunch time BBQ today, and one of my guests was a retired electornics engineer. Before long I showed him the guts of this PSU to ask if simply replacing the caps would fix it. He said it showed signs of heat damage and was the fan OK. He then declared the 120mm fan to be too tight. After my guests had gone I stripped the fan down and cleaned and lubricated the sleeve bearing.

Popped it in to one of my PCs and "Voila!" it lives again.

I can only guess that the tight fan was pulling down the 12V rail enough to interfere with the hard drive booting up.

I shall monitor the fan speed and temps to see how it goes and keep my fingers crossed.

Thought I might share this with you chaps, a dodgy PSU may just need a little maintenance.

Cheers

Crypto

airbornflght

I thought you were gonna show how to refurb a psu ourselves. Not to hard I guess, even if you would have to replace the FETs, as long as you could read the part#.