Cold Cathode Horror Tale....

The other day I noticed that some cold cathode lights weren't working on my cherished "printer-to-computer-deja-vu" machine. Not a big deal really, but none the less I was concerned. Surely two tubes didn't burn out at the same time, right? So last week I opened the top cover and started poking around a bit. I decided that everything was still hooked up, and the switch that turns the light on was still in the proper position, so maybe my inverter was not working. I removed the inverter (which I had to dissassemble to pull the dual cold cathode light wires out) and soon found the culprit - it blew out a few components. Two items show evidence of destruction, the blue (capacitor) and the brown (capacitor) components. These might not be capacitors, but if not, I'm not sure what they are. See for yourself.....:dead:




Lucky for me, I had a spare inverter in my box of tricks, so in five minutes I had the cold cathode tubes hooked up and running again.

 

i say, maybe two cathodes is to much for it :|

 

Perhaps, but it came with two cold cathodes installed (non-removable until you pull the case apart).

 

maybe its "el cheapo"

and they cooked whilist they were consealed inside the power supply

 

This is something that's been noted in the past, there were a bunch of manufacturers (probably cheap outfits selling the same crappy Taiwaneese junk) and this was happening a lot.

Stick to reputable brand name CCFL's.

 

Like who? Logisys, Thermaltake, what?? There are lots of "cheap" cold cathode manufacturers. This is actually the first failed inverter for me, so I'm not complaining. Especially when you look at the cheap prices I get dual kits for at www.SVC.com .

 

There is only one company i would trust for a CCFL invertor, and that would have to be CM, but then again all invertors are cheaply made.

 

Normally there's a rule of thumb to go by.

If the inverter is blue, it's a 50/50 chance it's bad.

If the inverter is black it should be alright.

Though that could have changed in the past 6 months.

 

The one that failed was black. I wouldn't go by case color.

 

Like I said, things may have changed, it was a rule of thumb last summer. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q="CCFL+Problems"&btnG=Search

 

Come on baby light my fire!

Oh, I see...:ball:

"
I've heard about this alot - at www.casemodgod.com they have a rant about it - two guys inverters started smoking then instantly exploded, one started a fire, which made me sceptical about buying CCFL's. I started thinking, and everytime ive heard about this its been when 2 of them are plugged into the inveter. I was (and might) buy the 2 blue CCFL pack from here, xoxide, seeing how it's only 8 bucks, but it says "cranked up to have 30,000 hour life and maximum brightness" or something like that.. which I'd think is more energy or mA, so im sceptical about them...."

By the way - Case Mod God is down right now. I hope somebody didn't wipe out their forums.

 

Yes, I noticed, when I went looking for the CCFL problem threads, CMG was the first link and I just clicked on it for the hell of it and noticed they were down. I see he's using Nuke, which is something I suggested that he do like over a year ago (before all of the hackers started taking down all the Nuke sites and I wized up and switched to Joomla) so it's likely he got hacked <sarcasm> I am SO SORRY for that</sarcasm>...

 

Dont be mean modfather give them back their site, just have an Announcement "dont trust the Admins"

As for the problem, i have never faced it, nor has anyone i met except you Al, i think its the Cheapo Kits you can buy with Dual CCFL's, I recommend buying a Single Kit and then buying a second, its less problems in the long run

 

Personally I've never had any CCFL problems, single or dual, blue or black inverters, no problems at all.

I didn't take their site down, don't even joke about that because if it WAS hacked I'd be a suspect considering those scumballs had my site taken down. I don't want them to have ANY reason to suspect me.

 

It was probably karma...what goes around comes around.

 

Why... Who did you kill this time Al?

 

...all my mortal enemies. It took a few minutes, but it was worth it.

 

You have WMD's?

Now we know where those pesky things disappeared to, give 'em back!

 

Speaking of WMD, did you hear that dirty bomb material was snuck into our country a couple of times as a test of the monitoring systems? Nothing like giving the terrorists some more ideas....

 

Are you guys planning on stopping Iran any time soon? Because we all know they're planning something, they've just been stalling.