Power supply: It lives!

The power supply lives!

On my initial inspection of the power supply, the only obvious thing wrong that I had found was a blown fuse. After replacing the power cord, I noticed the power on lamp had burned out too.

Off I went to the last remaining Radio Shack in my area (a franchise store, also known as Hurricane Electronics) to see if I could find some fuses and a replacement lamp. Found some replacement fuses easily enough (35V, 20A), and much to my surprise, replacement bulbs that were the exact same style as what was already on the power supply.

Replacing the light was easy enough, but took a bit longer than expected. The original pair of wires for the light kept breaking when I tried to put the light back into place, so I ended up just replacing the two wires with some 18 gauge stranded wire I had. Once the light was back in place, I plugged the power supply in and on came the light. Yay!

Power supply light
Power supply light

Then I replaced the fuse, turned it back on and was greeted with the meter telling me there was 13ish volts. With my DMM, I read 13.3 V DC at the meter.

13.4V DC output
13.4V DC output

I tweaked the pot at the control board to bring it up to 13.7 V DC.

Tweaked up to 13.7V DC output
Tweaked up to 13.7V DC output

So it looks like the only problem with the power supply was the blown fuse. Now to see how it works with a load applied.

Power supply schematic 20170708
Power supply schematic 20170708

One thought on “Power supply: It lives!”

  1. Well, poop. Now the power supply is behaving like the outputs are shorted out. Time to go poking around to see what the problem is. Maybe one of the capacitors near the output terminals that’s gone bad.

Comments are closed.