Saturday, March 5, 2011

Free Television Causes Hair Pulling

I was gifted a Vizio VW26L, a 26" class LCD television. It was broken, and the dozens of screws to hold the back panel to the chassis were missing. It had a classic case of bad power supply filter capacitors (read: capacitor plague) and these were replaced with components pulled from junked equipment. That got the television powered on. Then there was the small matter of the buttons not working. I replaced a switch with one from junked equipment. Then the buttons didn't all work, when the switches were installed in the television. I'm still scratching my head over that one. The bigger problem is that the set shuts itself off when the guts are warmed up with the cover on.

So I can leave a few hundred volts DC exposed for the children and VFDKitty to get into, or drill a few dozen more holes in the chassis and hope it will work with better ventilation! By the way, jeers to Vizio on this. The failed caps died from excessive heat, and are under a piece of sheet metal with no vents. Coincidence?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go test this TV for about a movie's length of time with the cover off ;)

2 comments:

KurtP said...

...And the TV preacher said:"
Do you BELIEVE?"

"Do you REALLY BELIEVE?"

"Then reach around the TV and FEEL the POWER of the Lord JEZZUS Christ!"

Vote For David said...

. . . um, no. Thanks. I think I'll let VFDKitty test the fuse instead.