Perhaps literally… it has bitten the dust. Although I wouldn’t call its installed location, dusty. Once again, the fan in the mains power supply has carked it.
Long-term followers of this project may remember that the last PSU failed the same way.
The reason has me miffed. All I did with the replacement, was take the PSU out of its box, loosen the two nuts for the terminals, slip the ring lugs for my power lead over the terminals, returned the nuts, plugged it in and turned it on.
While it is running 24×7, there is nothing in the documentation to say this PSU can’t run that way. This is what the installation looks like.
If it were dusty, I’d expect to be seeing hardware failures in my nodes.
This PSU is barely 4 months old, and earlier this week, the fan started making noises, and requiring percussive maintenance to get started. Tonight, it failed. Completely, no taps on the case will convince it to go.
Now, I need to keep things running until the weekend. I need it to run without burning the house down.
Many moons ago, my father bought a 12V fan for the caravan. Cheap and nasty. It has a slider switch to select between two speeds; “fast” and “slow”, which would be better named “scream like a banshee” and “scream slightly less like a banshee”. The speed reduction is achieved by passing current through a 10W resistor, and achieves maybe a 2% reduction in motor RPM. As you can gather, it proved to be a rather unwelcome room mate, and has seen its last day in the caravan.
This fan, given it runs off 12V, has proven quite handy with the cluster. I’ve got my SB-50 “load” socket hanging out the front of the cluster. A little adaptor to bring that out to a cigarette lighter socket, and I can run it off the cluster batteries. When a build job has gotten a node hot and bothered, sitting this down the bottom of the cluster and aiming it at a node has cooled things down well.
Tonight, it has another task … to try and suck the hot air out of the PSU.
That’s the offending power supply. A PowerTech MP-3089. It powers the RedARC BCDC-1225 right above it. And you can see my kludge around the cooling problem. Not great, but it should hold for the next 24 hours.
Tomorrow, I think we’ll call past Aspley and pick up another replacement. I’m leery of another now, but I literally have no choice … I need it now. Sadly, >250W 12V switchmode PSUs are somewhat rare beasts here in Brisbane. Altronics don’t sell them that big. The grinning glasses are no more, and I’m not risking it with the Xantrex charger again.
Long term, I’m already looking at the MeanWell SP-480-12. This is a PSU module, and will need its own case and mains wiring… but I have no faith in the MP-3089 to not fail and cremate my home of 34 years.
The nice feature of the SP-480-12 is that it does have a remote +12V power-off feature. Presumably I can drive this with a comparator/output MOSFET, so that when the battery voltage drops below some critical threshold, it kicks in, and when it rises above a high set-point, it drops out. Simple control, with no MCU involved. I don’t see a reason to get more fancy than that on the control side, anything more is a liability.
On other news, my gcc build on the TS-7670 failed … so much for the wait. We’ll try another version and see how we go.
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