Opened up my new Aquamedic ballast and uh oh.....

[oz]

I am not too familiar with lighting electronics so any advice on this one would be appreciated before I here back from Big D.....

Here are a couple pictures of the ballast internals i just took. One of the cylinders is burnt at the top - what are the cylinders for?

What's wierd is all the lights still worked but the fans don't.

 

[nova65chic]

will ask my husband when he gets home, he is an electrican

 

[dannybradley]

I've had a number of cheap ballast do that. I'm suprised to see an Aquamedic one have that problem. I believe it happens because of cheap wiring overheating.

 

[oz]

How did you fix it?

 

[wbholwell]

Most likely it's a capacitor that blew. Can you see any writing on the side of it? If it has a number followed by uF (micro Farads), then you could try to replace it with a similar sized capacitor.

 

[oz]

Electronicon
E01.F95-4032G0
MKP 32
250V. 50/60Hz
Made in Germany

 

[oz]

32uf that is.

 

[james s_]

Yup thats the capacitor. I would go to E Sam Jones on Atlanta Rd of off 285 or most Elec. Supply companies(Graybar,Rexel,Mayer). They should have them in stock. Easy fix but you may want to cut a few inches of the wires that attach to the Cap and re crimp some new connectors on them.

 

[oz]

Thanks man, any idea what the cost will be?

 

[jefft]

With the unit unpluged put a screwdriver across the tops of your capacitors to discharge any stored voltage. If you don't and there is any, your fingers will do it for you. This tends to hurt and scare the $hit out of you.

 

[reefjunkee]

Muuuuch cheaper than a new ballast.I believe they are fairly cheap.

 

[reefkeeper]

Chris, James (46bfinga) knows his stuff.

 

[simon_kruger]

Yes its a capacitor 32 micro farrads. Normal sized unit. Probably will cost you $20 or so. Nothing special. Any decent electrical store will have one.

 

[cameron]

jefft;140733 wrote: With the unit unpluged put a screwdriver across the tops of your capacitors to discharge any stored voltage. If you don't and there is any, your fingers will do it for you. This tends to hurt and scare the $hit out of you.

Never do that on a big cap... you can melt a screwdriver that way. You should always drain a cap with a small resistor or similar device.

 

[jefft]

Cameron;141863 wrote: Never do that on a big cap... you can melt a screwdriver that way. You should always drain a cap with a small resistor or similar device.

<span style="color: black;">You are correct, but I was telling him to do it on his unit. Those are not large caps. The average person will not come across large caps that could cause melting of a screwdriver. In addition, when you bring up all the examples of when they would if they are not experienced in draining a cap they are still better off using a screwdriver than taking a chance getting shocked trying to hook up a resistor. </span>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"> </span></span>

 

[cameron]

In most cases, a light bulb or LED is a good choice over a resistor and there really isn't anything to hook up... you just touch one side and then the other. An aligator clip with resistor works great as well. Often using the no resistence method will also melt delicate wires coming out of the cap or can outright damage the cap. As for a consumer not running into a large cap, TVs, PC power supplies, car audio, and lots of other places can and often do contain large caps. As a general rule, it is best to use some form of a resistor to discharge as most resistors are heat rated or burn off the juice in safer ways like a light bulb. Same for a battery if there is some reason to discharge it. If it is a small cap and you are tossing it anyway, I guess low resistence drain is OK but I always say better safe that sorry.

 

[cameron]

Oh and as a second note on this, before you put in a new cap you should discharge the existing circuit as well. Nothing says fried circuit like soldering in a new cap, discharge, arc and whack board blown. 999 times out a 1009 you will be fine, but every once in a while when I forget to manually discharge the circuit before working on it I get burned.

 

[george]

Is this ballast new or "new to you"? If the former, why repair when you can send it back? If it's "new to you", is it still under warranty?

 

[jefft]

Another not so cool thing, when I worked, we would get caps in with a shorting lead soldered across the terminals to keep and insure they are discharged. One of my fellow workers didn't know or see this and soldered the cap in and powered up the circuit. The cap survived, but the rest of the circuit didn't.

 

[cameron]

Ouch... my biggest screw up was removing a 20 farad cap in a car not paying attention and dropping a wrench which landed in the perfectly wrong spot. It melted a big chunk of the cap, part of the wiring to the car, burned some carpet, heat pitted the wrench, took me an hour to get the melted mess removed and I was feeling lucky I didn't explode the cap.