• Techweek

    Alan Liefting

    This week is Techweek, an annual talkfest here in New Zealand about the future of technology.  But there is something that they are not talking about.  I’ll jabber on a bit before making my point.

    I like technology. Especially electronics. I have been playing with it and fixing it for a long time.  I find it all really interesting.

    Unfortunately most technology has a dark side.  In the case of e-technology one of the problems is getting the stuff recycled.  It is changing at a great rate of knots and so the older stuff gets chucked out.  It is not surprising that it is a big part of the rubbish going to the landfill.

    There are some interesting things happening in labs around the world that may fix the e-waste problem but that it going to take a while.  In the meantime we have to process all of the e-junk in an environmentally friendly way.

    So I would like to ask the Techweek organisers why they have not included any items on e-waste in their programme?

    Maybe next year?

  • Spare parts suppliers

    Alan Liefting

    The electronics repair industry in New Zealand has been in decline for the past two or three decades for various reasons including  the flood of cheap commodity goods, poor support from the manufacturers, and rapidly changing technology.

    One indication of the decline of the repair industry is the plight of component suppliers.  The company that I first worked for, TESA (an abbreviation of Television Engineers and Supplies Associates), has been subsumed into Lacklands.  And now, as of last month, Trade Tech, one of the other large component suppliers, has gone into liquidation.

    The annoying thing is that I placed an order for some parts with them not knowing that they were in liquidation.  Only three parts out of an order of ten turned up.  I am still waiting for the remaining seven after about three weeks.  I might not see the rest of the parts.

    In Hong Kong they have electronics repair shops next to the footpath.  Here in New Zealand most of suburban radio and television repair shops closed down years ago.
    Image: Wikimedia Commons.

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  • Moore’s Law for corporate computer repair

    Alan Liefting
    xkcd tells it like it is.

    Given the amount of stuff coming through for recycling from our corporate clients this pretty much sums it up.

     

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  • A throwaway society

    Alan Liefting

    We really are in a throwaway society.  We have  been calling it that since the 1950s and all of this technology of ours is an increasing part of the throwaway society.

    I had a Canon PIXMA MG2960 ink jet printer/scanner come in for recycling.  I can’t find any date code on it without stripping it down but it looked brand spanking new.

    Apparently the paper was not feeding.  I was going to see if it was fixable but it had no ink cartridges.  I then jumped online and checked it out.  It sells for a mere $32.99!  And it is still a current model!  I did know that these low end inkjet printers are cheap but I just can’t get used to the idea of these low prices.  These printers sell for less than the minimum service fee that most repair companies charge out.

    This is nothing new of course.  Back in the early 2000s I worked for a company that did a lot of printer repairs, including low end inkjets.  The minimum service fee was $33.75.  It got to the stage that we had to charge that fee up front because we were left with too many cheap inkjet printers that the customers did not want to have repaired.  So not only was the company out of pocket for the time taken to do the diagnostics for a quote but there was also the disposal cost of the unwanted printer.

    It is easy to see why the amount of e-waste is rising and the repair industry is in decline. We really are in a throwaway society.

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  • A missing screw

    Alan Liefting

    A Philips 42TA2800 LCD TV came in for recycling.
    “It works” the customer said, “It is just the power switch.”
    The actual plastic power switch actuator was missing and you could see that the power switch circuit board was just dangling off the cables.  It looks like they were poking the pcb mounted power switch (two in series) to get it to turn on.  I don’t think they had the remote control for it.

    After taking it apart I discovered this:

    Photo of the rear of the power switch circuit board
    The power switch circuit board is positioned to try and show the lack of a second screw ever having been present in the plastic support.

    There was ever only one screw holding the power switch circuit board in place.  The other was never fitted!  So the plastic support broke.  Not surprisingly. This is a power switch.  Something that is often abused.  And in this case it had to do a lot of work because of the lack of a remote.

    So what happened here Philips?  Are these TVs not made in highly automated factories with all sorts of quality checking including the use of image recognition?  So did this one slip past the inspections?   Or is this inbuilt obsolescence?  Or are you saving one screw and one extra assembly operation to save a fraction of a cent?

    Get back to me on it please Philips.  Thanks.

    Anyway, talking about customers and switches and faults brought back some memories. When the customer said “It is just the switch” I was reminded of my days repairing the old school CRT monitors and the even earlier days of repairing CRT TVs.  Customers would sometimes give their diagnosis as “It is just the switch” or “One of the guns has gone”.  It got the stage where I thought customers think that a CRT TV or monitor only consists of a CRT and a switch!  They don’t know that there are power supplies, HV stages, signal processing circuits all containing resistors, capacitors, semiconductors, wires, cables, connections etc and all of which can fail.

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  • It is hard to do but don’t do it

    Alan Liefting

    Check out these 300mm long cables that came out of some gear that we recycled!

    image of three short power cords with a label saying "WARNING DO NOT OPERATE UNLESS CORD IS FULLY UNCOILED"
    “WARNING DO NOT OPERATE UNLESS CORD IS FULLY UNCOILED”
    Yep! Like everything else on the internet it is for real. Got to be because it is in full colour!

    I managed, with some difficulty, to get three tight coils out of  it.  The label is a complete waste of time, and I think some of the other ones I came across did not have the labels.

    Some of you are probably wondering why you see these warning labels on cables, especially extension leads and retractable vacuum cleaner leads. It is due to the temperature rating of the cable.  Most cables used on appliances are PVC sheathed and PVC has a maximum temperature rating of 105°C.  If the cable is coiled up and has a load plugged into it it will heat up more than if it was uncoiled.  How much the cable heats up depends on how tightly it is coiled, the current though the cable, the resistance of the cable, the air flow (if any) though the coiled cable, and the ambient temperature.

    We can do some maths on it.

    Total resistance of the cable (300mm long with two conductors of 0.75 mm2):

    R = ρ L/A = 1.68 x 10-8 x (2 x 0.3)/0.75 x 10-6 = 0.013 Ω

    Power dissipated at the maximum loading of 10 amps:

    P = I2 x R = 102 x 0.013 = 1.3 W

    That does not equate to a lot of heat.  My head is spinning with all of this maths so I am not going to do any more to figure out the temperature rise. I know from experience that 1.3 W is not going to give much of a rise in the cable temperature.

    So I guess the labels were slapped on the cables by the production staff when they were made in the factory because they are put on the longer ones.  They did not consult the engineers about whether they were needed.

    Or are we in a really risk averse world?

     

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  • It would be irresponsible not to!

    Alan Liefting

    I was reading the sales blurb for the ASUS Vivobook X556UQ and one of the things that is announced as a really cool thing is the short circuit protection for the battery. 

    I had to laugh!

    It would be really stupid and irresponsible to NOT have short circuit protection for the battery.  Lithium ion batteries can put out enough current to cause fires.  Take the recent recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 for instance.  They had some sort of battery fault that caused some of them to catch fire and Samsung ended up recalling millions of phones although in this case a short circuit protection may not have helped because it may have been a fault internal to the battery.

    So ASUS, you may fool the general public into thinking that short circuit protection is a good thing but you ain’t going to fool the techies!

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  • Whirlpool and obsolescence

    Alan Liefting

    A Whirlpool VT256/SL microwave oven came in for recycling this week that looked like a good candidate for refurbishment.  It was dead. It had a blown fuse and a shorted high voltage capacitor in the voltage doubler circuit.   So I replaced the blown bits and it ran up sweet.

    And then I checked out the waveguide covers because they sometimes get a bit carbonised and start arcing.  We sell a lot of them through our online shop (sorry about the advert but hey you are getting a free blog post!)

    This microwave has two mica waveguide covers – one at the top and one at the bottom.  Most microwaves only have one.

    So take a look at this photo.

    whirlpool-vt256-burnup

    The carbonisation happened around a bead of glue that goes across the waveguide cover, probably due to food residues getting trapped on it.  Now take a look at the wall of the cavity above the waveguide cover.  For some reason there is an extra level of indentation between the waveguide cover and the cavity wall.  Why?  And what does the glue do?  Is the bead of glue in the wrong place? Should it have been  acting as a sealant in the wide gap between the waveguide cover and the cavity wall?

    I don’t think it is a deliberate ploy to create inbuilt obsolescence.  The Whirlpool microwave ovens are generally built quite well.

    I have come up with a decent fix for it so if you need one buy one here!

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  • e-terminology

    Alan Liefting

    wordcloud

    I am a bit pedantic about words and I sometimes find the English language a bit messy and illogical.  Anyway, I was compiling a glossary in our knowledge base for the work that we do and I remembered that there are some words which don’t officially exist yet.

    Here at Ecotech Services we commonly describe our business activity as “repair, refurbishment, and recycling of electrical, electronic, and computer equipment.”  I can see the potential for a new word here to make the phrase less of a mouthful.

    Now computers are just a particular type of electronic equipment so it is really a redundant word in our description but we put it in there because computers are seen by a lot of people as being separate to electronics stuff. People often get confused about the correct terminology to use for technology.

    Customers sometime describe a desktop computer box as a hard drive whereas in actual fact the hard drive is just one of the assemblies in the box.  And that reminds me of my more youthful days back in the ’70s and ’80s.  Back then – in an era pre-dating Walkmans, boomboxes, MP3 players, and now smartphones – we relied on radios to get music and information.  The portable radios were often called “transistors” which is a misnomer for the correct term of transistorised radios.

    So getting back to 21st century language I think we need just one word that describes “electrical, electronic, and computer equipment” because all this stuff uses electricity.  I think the word should be “e-technology ” and it can be shortened to e-tech.

    There are a lot of other e-words in my job – e-mail, e-waste, e-scrap, e-cycling (but we should use e-recycling because this does not make it sound like an electric bike), and now I can add e-tech.  And I guess I am an e-technician.  An e-techie.  And Ecotech Services does e-repair and e-recycling of e-technology.

    Nice!

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  • It’s amazing – the homemade LCD screen cleaner

    Alan Liefting

    I have been refurbishing a stack of LCD monitors and I had a hard time getting the LCD screens completely streak free after cleaning them.  I was using an environmentally friendly general purpose cleaner but I also tried methylated spirits (Oooops – petroleum product. Sorry about that).

    So I did an internet search and good old Google gave me some good answers.
    unneeded-lcd-cleaner-kit
    The general recommendation is one part vinegar (or isopropyl alcohol) to one part water.  So as a greenie and as a cheaper option I tried the vinegar and water mix.  I used a sprayer bottle to apply the cleaner to the screens.

    The results were really amazing!  I had some really dirty looking monitors that came up nicely!  There is no need for those expensive LCD cleaner kits at all!  Good old cheap, environmentally friendly vinegar does the trick!

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