Television repair - help required

chillidoggy · April 2020

crunchman said:

chillidoggy said:

My boiler is an Ideal Elan 60. It's so simple, easier to fix than a Fender, and there's a fantastic troubleshooting flow chart for it. Not that I need it these days, the only thing I haven't replaced over the years is the heat exchanger and the casing. Once the heat exchanger goes, it's game over, though.
A new one is going to cost the thick end of a couple of grand to get installed, so I'm keeping it going for now. As my gas and lecky bills combined total about £1,300 a year for fairly large house, I can't imagine I would make enough savings on boiler efficiency to warrant a new one.

I take it you don't have a wife and daughters who that like to run baths that come up to the overflow on a regular basis (not to mention not switching off lights and other electrical equipment).

Ha, ha! No, it's just me and 'er.indoors. Showers are the norm, baths are only used on rare occasions.

The water consumption has shot up since I retired though. This is due to me having to piss every 5 minutes (well, that's what it seems like), and the wife gets arsey when I don't flush the bog. I told her "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down", but she's having none of it.

Danny1969 · April 2020

The boiler went down at the studio once in Winter, basically would ignite for 5 seconds then stop, was freezing so even though we were skint we got a boiler engineer out. He goes through the fault flow chart and says it's the PCB .... new one about £300. Obviously I wasn't keen on that so I said take the PCB out and I'll fix it. The board was pretty simple, just a load of relays, little bit of primitive logic working from various transducers but I couldn't find a single bad component or even a slightly bad joint. Now I don't know fuck all about boilers but with a massive reluctance to spend any money me and my equally tight business partner start thinking about how various bits of it work.

Drawing it out on paper I can see there was some kind of transducer sat in the flame area and we decide that reports back to the board and tells the board to keep the gas on if it's hot ... otherwise no flame so turn the gas off. We were pretty sure it was that so ordered another at £12 and fitted it ....... same deal so back to the drawing board. I was convinced the problem was in this area though so took the board out and after a while I could see there was another transducer in parallel with the one that sat near the flame and this one went under the sink into the U-Bend. So disconnected that and the boiler fired up perfectly ... cleaned the U-Bend out and all was well.

So I've never been a fan of fault flow charts or electronic diagnostics on cars. I once spend days trying to fix a Mk7 Transit that wouldn't start .... Ford diags kept saying the injectors were functioning correctly. No fault codes engine wise. Changed the crank position sensor, changed the pump ... no joy. In the end I stripped down the top end and 2 of the injectors were functioning correctly ... only they weren't sat in the engine anymore because a bracket that clamps both in had broken and the compression had blow both out the engine to the point they were just loosely sitting on top.

IBM Thinkpad diags were a good source of revenue for us back in the nineties. When the CMOS battery dropped below 1.8V or so the inbuilt diags would report the fan had failed and refuse to boot. Being the biggest laptop parts supplier in the south we were sat on hundreds on IBM fans. Customer would ring up .... I need a fan ..... it's not the fan we would say it's the CMOS battery. No it's the fan customer would say... definitely the fan. Ok we say, fan's £29 plus VAT ... if you buy it you keep it we don't accept returns on service parts. Ok says customer .......... 3 days later same customer on the phone .... can I buy a CMOS battery for a ThinkPad 600

randella · April 2020

I must admit I do have a thing for fixing stuff. I once mended a big tube telly for £3 - the degauss positor was shot which was a double bonus as it was cheap, and located nowhere near the big electrolytics which supply the 25KV to the guns.

The fridge freezer went on the blink last year, during a ridiculously hot day - another cheap fix, £5 for a new motor run capacitor instead of the £400 bill I would have got from AO for a like-for-like replacement.

It doesn't always come off - despite ICBM's best efforts at helping me out with an old Crate solid state amp a few years ago, it had to go to the tip. Still whereas the fridge is handy for keeping beer chilled, that amp always sounded pretty ropey even when it was working so it turned out the right way around in the end

Kittyfrisk · April 2020

Used to be a MK2 4GB iPod mini, now a 256GB solid state. It was originally a freebie from a mate as the battery had gone.
Has a Wolfson DAC, sounds as good as any MP3 player I have heard. Good fun to sort out

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Television repair - help required

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