Panasonic ES15 blown caps?
 

After a period of no use I fired up the Panasonic ES15 and it went all stupid on me. It would say hello, then please wait and then switch itself off. There was no pattern to it's erratic behaviour.

So I opened it up.

I found 3 electrolytics that had blown their lids. Two were in the power supply section and the other on the main board.

I replaced them with Panasonic caps and it's back to normal - dare I say the video out of it now looks a little cleaner :hmm:

Pictures of the blown caps below.

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Yeah, those are kaput. Let's see the finished product.

Nice closeups, what did you use to shoot them?

I had a 25V 470uF low ESR capacitor spare and I soldered it onto the clipped leads of the old cap because access to underneath the main board was too difficult.

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The pictures were taken with an iPhone 13 plus in macro mode. All iPhones 13 and above have this feature. It's amazing! I had an LED light adding a bit of fill as well.

Nice work my friend

Just a question: had the unit been plugged into the mains and in standby? I've seen PS caps go like this when the PS is still running for an extended period.

Yes it was and so was my JVC VCR which also had a blown cap and switching FET in the power supply section. I was complacent thinking it'll be all right, but lesson learned.

There's a switchmode power supply in standby mode in virtually everything electronic around the average house. Sure they are efficient and draw very little power to keep that little red LED on, but ultimately there are components with a constant potential difference across them and with time and ambient heat/cold cycles, those components may fail.

Then again, a computer tech told me many years ago he tells his office customers to keep the computers on day to day because switching them on in the morning then off at the end of the day puts electrical and temperature stresses on the components as they power up and back down. He found those computers that are kept on day and night had the least faults:confused:

It's you and your luck really.:unsure:

I'm not sure about this advice either but have no hard evidence either way. I would have thought these devices were designed for a soft start. By nature arent they are a PWM system?

I also try to avoid leaving fan cooled devices on for long periods when not in actual use, as it greatly increases the amount of dust sucked into the device, which eventually leads to overheating of the same devices the fans were designed to protect! As for some VCR's with inbuilt cooling fans, dust and dirt present a real risk of permanent scratching of tapes, heads, drums etc. I guess the manufacturers were responding to market demands for smaller, lighter, cheaper devices but which ultimately are less reliable unless the fan cooling systems are regularly maintained.