Monitors dropping like flies

[TekkyMatt]

Hi all, around school at the moment I have a problem where a certain make and model of 15" tft (roughly 4 yrs old) are all dying with backlight / inverter problems. I currently have over 22 of these in storage all with exactly the same problem and all died within a 2 month period. I also have another 63 around school, some are going quite dark.

The monitors are rebadged GNR F153 (15 in - TFT active matrix - 250 cd/m2 - 350:1 - 1024 x 768 - 30 ms)

I am in the Birmingham area, would it be more cost effective to get the backlight repaired seeing as I have so many? Do people do it in my area? am I in for a bad time?

Cheers,

[SpuffMonkey]

You could do it yerself

http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISA...rid=micro-lite

[TekkyMatt]

If I did do it myself, what would be the implications on health and safety as I am not a qualified electrical engineer (although quite confident that I could do it easily). Would I be liable if one of them blew up and the mecury vapour inside the ccfl caused a panic?
Also, £70 seems alot to repair a 15" tft when you can get them cheaper new

[Geoff]

Your insurance turns into a useless bit of paper.

[garthsmojo]

On most tft's it is not the backlight that goes, it is just a couple of capacitors on the ac-dc invertor board that has gone. Open one of the monitor and look at the long thin board with the wires going to the top and bottom of the screen. Normally around the middle of this board there are two square plastic or metal round capacitors. The plastic ones will have a small hole blown in one of then corners and the metal ones will be domed on the top. Replace these for about 15p each and your screen will be working.

All you need is a soldering iron and a nice electronics teacher.

[FN-GM]

If I did do it myself, what would be the implications on health and safety as I am not a qualified electrical engineer (although quite confident that I could do it easily). Would I be liable if one of them blew up and the mecury vapour inside the ccfl caused a panic?
Also, £70 seems alot to repair a 15" tft when you can get them cheaper new

Well if that happens just don't let on

[TekkyMatt]

On most tft's it is not the backlight that goes, it is just a couple of capacitors on the ac-dc invertor board that has gone. Open one of the monitor and look at the long thin board with the wires going to the top and bottom of the screen. Normally around the middle of this board there are two square plastic or metal round capacitors. The plastic ones will have a small hole blown in one of then corners and the metal ones will be domed on the top. Replace these for about 15p each and your screen will be working.

All you need is a soldering iron and a nice electronics teacher.

Does the doming on the top of the capacitor suggest it has blown, because the ones associated with the inverter are fine and they also test out fine. However, there is another capacitor on the main board that looks like a small bomb went off inside it (domed top, the top is scored so the thing looks like it burst open and its browned around the middle) Coud this be the one I need to replace?

[john]

Thats the one, thats Capacitor Cancer, if you search for that there was a really really large batch of capacitors that had that problem around the time you bought the screens.

[TekkyMatt]

Thats the one, thats Capacitor Cancer, if you search for that there was a really really large batch of capacitors that had that problem around the time you bought the screens.

Well, it works. Most (but not all) have that specific capacitor blown and a replacement was 34p from our local CEF, took 5 mins to resolder and now they work. Big thanks to garthsmojo for explaining the fix and saving me lots of precious money and thanks to John for the final push into fixing it.
I wish I could share the love that people have for me for repairing them.

Cheers

[garthsmojo]

No problem happy to help

[garthsmojo]

No problem happy to help

[john]

Glad that was the nudge you needed to fix them, I wouldn't have but then again im not the neatest with the soldering Iron but getting better by the day.