watercooled (07-01-2009)
watercooled (07-01-2009)
What's the best way to clean dust out of a PSU? Using a vacuum cleaner apparently creates static and it doesn't clean it anyway, air dusters just blow dust all over the place and makes you cough. Is it OK to open then?
watercooled (07-01-2009)
watercooled (07-01-2009)
watercooled (07-01-2009)
Sticking a vacuum cleaner to it is ok AS LONG as you follow these rules
1- Unplug it from your pc (this is mainly a simple idiot check so incase you do damage it there should be no chance of damaging your pc as well) You caan leave it pluged into the wall as long as the wall switch if off (this will also earth it)
2- Stop the fan from spinning, this is the big danger of vacuum cleaners, if you manually spin a computer fan it becomes a dynamo and will feed power back into what ever it is attached to.
A Vacuum cleaner can move a far greater volume of air than a pc fan, which means if you make a pc fan spin with a vacuum cleaner it will spin much faster than normal.
Which in turn will generate far higher voltages than is used to power it and that high voltage current will be feed back into whatever it's pluged into from the wrong direction so to speak.
The same applies when cleaning a pc with a vacuum cleaner, unplug and disable ALL fans.
It also applies to cans of compressed air, the compressed air can spin a fan far faster than normal feeding back a higher voltage into whatever the fan was attached to. (I've accedently killed a projector, because I missed one fan when cleaning it with compressed air, I took out a control board (2 resisters burnt out) and power regulator of the psu.
Simple way to disable a fan, stick a cocktail stick through the fan grill and between the blades so the fan cannot rotate, then secure the cocktail stick so it will not fall or be sucked out. (tape or a large lump of bluetak works well)
Last edited by Pob255; 07-01-2009 at 03:21 PM.
watercooled (07-01-2009)
Sounds good. I've tried with a vacuum before I heard it wasn't a good idea. I now leave my PC plugged in but not switched on by the socket/PSU when I'm working inside so it's earthed. Don't bother with wrist straps, though - I just touch the psu all the time.
watercooled (07-01-2009)
one thing i did was on my p182, i put the PSU in upside down. and it seems pretty dust free.
i also used a make up brush (clean of course) to dislodge it, i always use a makeup brush to remove thick dust.. i have also very little air flow in my computer now. i have only 3 fans spinning, removed gpu fan, only have one on the psu, and one exhaust. all on low setting.
watercooled (07-01-2009)
Got no probs with using a Hiper
Deo Adjuvante non Timendum
watercooled (07-01-2009)
New Hipers now use quality oems, forgot what they were tho
I did say in the same post that no-one can say for certain...
Some may last decades, others, a few weeks, it's just 'luck of the draw' as is everything else in tech..
However, personally, i would expect the mean life of a Seasonic/Enermax/Corsair unit to be longer than that of a EZcool/Qtec etc
Last edited by TAKTAK; 07-01-2009 at 07:36 PM.
Failures in bits of kit are measured by MTBFs, which means Mean Time Between Failures. Those who know anything about statistics will realise this will follow a Normal Distibution curve http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalDistribution.html, and your partcular bit of kit could be anywhere on that curve.
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