Repaired my Laptop's Power System Today

Hey Everyone,

There's nothing worse than a computer failure especially if the computer itself is fine but you can't recharge it and turn the thing on.

Recently my laptop stopped accepting energy from the power supply; lasted a good year and a half before this. It took a lot of fiddling to get the recharge light to turn on so I could use it but after a little while even that stopped working, I tried to De-oxidize the connection surface by cleaning it with some alcohol but even then it still didn't work.

When I was younger I had a tendency to take things apart; I was very curious of how things worked, sadly at that time of my life I had a habit of not putting things back together but thankfully I've learned better since then.

I decided that it was time to repair my laptop once and for all; by completely replacing the power connection inside, I had some spare electronics that was no longer of use that had a power socket which was compatible with a plug I had lying about so I De-soldered it from the board. It took a while to open up my laptop; finding all the hidden screws and storing them away safe so I could put everything back together eventually: I had actually opened my laptop a few times before this out of curiosity so I got pretty good at opening it this time. Once I had opened the laptop I unscrewed the power board and detached it, I aligned the new power socket up for comparison and it looked like it would fit inside perfectly so I began work on the power system. I detached the old socket and aligned the new one up, soldered it on and made sure everything looked ok.

Here you can see the new socket attached and the old one on the right:

After the new socket was successfully attached I discovered that one of the surface mounted components had disintegrated into powder under the heat of the soldering iron, it was just too close to the socket. I needed to know what I destroyed so I could repair it, I performed a continuity test and one side connected to positive and the other to ground which indicated to me that I had destroyed a small capacitor used for smoothing out the power coming in. I got out one of my 0.01uf micro farad capacitors albeit much larger than a tiny surface mounted one and attached it on the other side which had much easier to access connections that the ones the original component was using.

Here you can see the new capacitor attached and ready to go:

Once everything was soldered I double checked everything and placed the board back inside the laptop making sure to attach all the wires. I aligned it up and began to screw it back in place and thankfully it fit like a glove, here you can see it back where it belongs:

I hooked up the power supply to my new plug, it's one of those power supplies that support multiple connectors that attached to the end so I had to adapt my connection to it. I made absolutely sure that it would not break for a long time by layering heat shrink as these kinds of connectors have a tendency to break and bend otherwise. Here you can see what I came up with:

It worked! The charging light is lit and I have power again:

Sure beats the thought of buying a whole new laptop.

Thanks for reading,

Ashton.

Repaired the Dishwasher Today

Hey Everyone,

One of the things I like to do around the house when something breaks is make absolutely sure that the thing that breaks can be fixed before writing it off for scrap and spare parts. Today I found all the cutlery and plastic in the dishwasher bent, burned and pretty much destroyed. I thought about how that could have happened knowing that it couldn't have been an acid from the dishwasher powder since plastic is immune to it so the only thing it could have been was heat.

I took out everything including the sliding draws so I could perform a test run. After a little while I noticed the distinctive sound that I always heard was gone; the loud grumbling noise indicative of the pump below. I opened the door after a minute and the heating element at the bottom was red hot but not a scrap of water was shooting about to cool it so something had stopped the pump from working.

It took a little time to disconnect it from the water and power before pulling it out from under the kitchen bench so I could examine it in detail but once I had it out I could get to work. I removed the front panel and examined every part of the circuit looking for burned out components or some sign of what had happened to it. The relays had a little singe but that was to be expected since the machine was 10 years old and I knew they were working as I tested the machine again with the relays visible. I took the circuit diagram, traced it to the main pump and found it connected to the second relay on line L1. I followed the wires and found one of them had snapped due to being unnecessarily tight against the corner of the metal frame; all the other wires seemed fine and not under stress, I grabbed my heat shrink, soldering iron etc and set to work.

I reconnected the wires back together making sure to heat shrink both sides and ran another test, this time I reconnected the water and the pump started up just like it had for the last decade. When I opened the door it shot water at me and drenched me completely; guess I had the water turned up too high.

After re-attaching everything back to the frame I slid it back under the kitchen bench and screwed it back in to the wooden frame. I added a few more screws here and there for good measure and in just a couple of hours I had a working dishwasher again and saved a lot of money too which is always nice. :)

Thanks for reading,
Ashton.