[sllug-members]: Zapped power supply

[Michael Heath]

That 'white foamy stuff' is probably leaking electrolyte. You probably
shorted something with the liquid and caused the thing to blow.

At any rate, don't dare power on the machine with that thing in it anymore,
regardless of if it works for a while or not. In power supplies, capacitors
are a critical component for the rectification process, and broken
capacitors leads to bad or unstable output voltages. This can potentially do
anything from fry components of your mainboard or processor to kill all of
your hard drives and cd-drives in one blow by a bad 12V line (12V line is
used for the main motors in those devices).

Some vendors will give lifetime or longterm warranties on power supplies.
Look for one of those.


I'm curious, though, what kind of propellant was it? Most things I'm aware
of being used as propellant are non-conductive.

Mike Heath

On Dec 16, 2007 2:21 PM, David J Iannucci <fyyht at punchcutter.ml1.net> wrote:

> I've opened up the power supply,
> and find there's some dried white foamy stuff on some of the
> capacitors(?).
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