TEXAS Power Supply — The easiest way Necessary repairs It all

I’d stopped repairing ATX power a long time back because of the new one cost very cheap. It’s not worth to repair it since the spare parts sometimes were much more costly than obtaining a new power supply. Trying to find ATX power spare parts wasn’t easy as many of them you can’t even see them on the internet. Not only this, many complicated and different designed by power manufacturers had eaten up our precious troubleshooting time too because of we truly need time for you to know how all these different designed power work.

Some of the power designs were using the PWM IC (UC3842) and power FET, some utilize the double transistors though some use just a single power IC in the primary side. Because of the manufacturers wants the design to be made into compact size, many secondary or even primary power circuit were build into a modular board (smaller board). This made troubleshooting even more difficult because often times the meter’s probe can’t reach to the testing point.

The true reason why I’d stopped repairing ATX power was the profit margin. If you charge to high the customers rather buy a new unit with one year warranty given. P2001 power station  If you charge too low, you might result in the losing side due to the components replaced, electricity and etc. If you charge reasonable, the profit margin gained can’t even cover your own time spent on troubleshooting it. I’m here to not discourage you to prevent repairing ATX power, however when you have the time, have contacts getting cheap power components, easy to access many power schematic diagrams and etc then you may proceed to correct it.

Okay back again to the article, certainly one of my customers had asked me to correct his ATX power supply. I told him to acquire a new one (since it was very cheap) but he said he couldn’t find the one that suits his customer’s CPU. He wanted a power supply that is either same size or smaller then a original one with same or older specification but all he may find was a standard size power!

As a favors to my customer, I would do my best to simply help him to correct the ATX power supply. When the energy supply was switch on, measurements were taken. The outcome were over voltage. The 12 volts line shot around 13 + volt and the 5 volts line became 5.6 volts. Following the casing was removed, I discovered the within was very dirty and I used a vacuum cleaner and a comb to clean off the dirt. Then I saw four filter electrolytic capacitors had bulged at the top casing.

Everbody knows, we as electronic repairers can’t just see things at just one side; we’ve to see the other sides too. What After all was, try to see if there are any suspicious components that contributed to the failure of the energy supply such as for example broken components, dry joints, loose connection, decay glue and etc before start checking the suspected area.

What I saw was at the primary side there have been some components covered with decayed glue as noticed in the picture. I need to carefully take it off by scrapping off the layers of the decayed glue while preserving the outer layers of the components. Once it was done, I clean it with the Thinner solution. Decayed glue could cause serious or intermittent problem in electronic equipment because it could be conductive.

If you repair any ATX power, ensure you check the fan too because some power failure was due to heat the effect of a faulty fan. The goal of the fan is always to suck out all heat generated by the components inside the energy supply. In order for the fan to operate smooth, you can service it with a Philips oil base spray as shown in the photo.

After the four electrolytic capacitors were replaced and the decayed glue removed, I then need to plug it into a junk motherboard along with a hard disk to test the performance of the ATX power and measure every one of its output voltages. It seems like the output voltages were back again to normal. Once everything is okay I then test it in a working CPU to check on for the display.

The reason I test it with a junk motherboard first as an easy way to not cause my good motherboard to lose their freshness in case if the output voltages is still very high. Better safe than regret later. By the way you can’t test a power supply without load otherwise it could switched on for a while and then shut down. If you do not have a junk motherboard you can always at least connect a hard disk drive and a cable jumper to its connector to turn on the ATX power supply.