Yorkshire based power supply repair specialist celebrates strong demand for its technical services after repairing its 10,000th unit.
Managing Director Paul Horner recalls the journey:
“I can’t quite believe we have just repaired our 10,000th unit. The vast majority of these have been AC-DC power supplies which is what we specialise in, but we’ve also seen a good number of AC inverters, UPS’s and industrial control gear as well.
Looking back over the years, I think the most difficult thing we ever repaired was, by pure coincidence, our first job! There were only 3 of us back then and I remember we had just launched the website in 2002 when we got an enquiry from the Czech Republic regarding a Farnell TRA2800 rectifier which had gone faulty.
When it arrived at the lab in the U.K. it had the typical failed electrolytics on the auxiliary psu but there was also a second, more strange fault whereby it would shut down at >80% load. Bizarrely, it did not exhibit the fault when a scope probe was connected to any of several nodes around the control circuit. That kind of made it difficult to see what was happening dynamically and I remember we spent days on the damned thing (at a fixed repair charge)!
In the end, the problem was traced to HF noise interference upsetting the control circuit (the scope probe was effectively acting as a 25pF snubber) and the solution was to add a suppression cap to ground. It was only digging through the Farnell archives much later that found that this was actually an official design revision on later units! You kind of don’t expect to have to do that on your first job and we wondered what the hell we had let ourselves into.
The most bizarre thing we have ever repaired was probably a control panel for a JCB excavator. It’s not exactly something we advertise but when you are practised at fault finding to component level, most things are possible. The assembly had obviously been damp and had traces of silt in the enclosure which seemed a little odd. The repair turned out to be relatively straight forward but it wasn’t until the customer later told us that the operator had toppled the entire JCB into a lake that it all made sense. That must have been an interesting day at work!
I think it is testament to our engineer’s abilities that we have had so much repeat business—the guys are mostly ex-Farnell power supply design engineers so they have a very high appreciation of switch mode technology. The diligence of their repair work has given us a repair yield of 99.84% which is way above the average for this industry. To say I’m proud would be an understatement.”
Advance Product Services Ltd.
DC Power Supply Repair Specialists.
www.advanceproductservices.co.uk
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