27 Aug
2016
27 Aug
'16
6:02 p.m.
On Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:49:03 +0100
Will Godfrey <willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk> wrote:
I don't know if people are generally aware of
this, but round about
the turn of the century, the market was flooded with cheap
electrolytics from Taiwan that were made with a defective
electrolyte.
Found out about this when one of our more recent Viewsonic monitor
suddenly failed. Which was surprising since mine, a VP211b, is in
service, always powered on even when the computer isn't, since 2006.
10 years without any problems.
The story behind this, told by a colleague, is that a Chinese company
has pirated only half of the plans to make capacitors. Their recipe
left out the most important part.
This is so much of a known problem that capacitor kits are available on
Amazon (or Amasszone if we go by David McCandless' book "The Internet
Now In Handy Book Form") for specific monitors.
Apparently these are *still* turning up in new
equipment
and are extremely difficult to identify until they fail :(
IMHO I don't think these faulty caps are still used today. They were
quite precisely identified since then, I think the company went over,
and people do not want to use them in their products for obvious
reasons.
Cheers.