Five years of ordering the same wrong capacitor pack

I've been fixing flat-screen TVs for about 6 years now and always used 450V caps because I thought higher voltage meant safer. Then a dude from a shop in Detroit came into a repair meetup last month and asked why I was putting oven components in a monitor. Turns out the ESR rating mattered way more than the voltage for what I was doing. Anyone else been using the wrong caps for way too long without knowing?

2 comments

2 Comments

coleman.henry6d ago

My buddy Dave runs a TV repair shop over in Toledo. About four years ago he was getting a weird hum out of a 32 inch Vizio and swapped out every cap on the power board with 630V parts he bought off some surplus site. The thing kept dying every three months. He finally called a retired TV guy from like the 90s who laughed and said the caps were too slow for the switching frequency. Dave switched to low ESR caps and that same Vizio has been running fine since 2019. Sometimes the old heads know whats up even if they dont use fancy words.

kelly33821h ago

Honestly that story is such a perfect example of how people think higher voltage parts are always better just because they can "take more". It's like putting truck tires on a Honda Civic and wondering why the ride gets rough. I see this all the time with my neighbor who puts the biggest, heaviest duty extension cords on his Christmas lights when a cheap thin one would work fine. People don't realize that spec compatibility matters way more than just raw capacity.