Power Supply Failures

The cluster focuses on discussions of electronics hardware failures caused by faulty power supplies, bad capacitors, transformers, poor wiring, grounding issues, and dirty power.

📉 Falling 0.4x Hardware
3,063
Comments
19
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#3020
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2008
4
2009
17
2010
24
2011
38
2012
59
2013
61
2014
87
2015
95
2016
144
2017
131
2018
153
2019
247
2020
212
2021
283
2022
378
2023
417
2024
362
2025
339
2026
12

Keywords

DANGER OP LCD LED VP1600 news.cnet T1 UK aplomb.nl AFTER power voltage power supply transformer cable supply caps trace circuit resistance

Sample Comments

newman8r Nov 15, 2018 View on HN

It's often a faulty transformer

zdragnar May 15, 2022 View on HN

Dirty power and poor wiring are terrible for many things. It's not a surprise it might cause issues with this too.

agumonkey May 21, 2019 View on HN

oh so it's an electronics level failure ? interesting

heavyset_go Jun 8, 2020 View on HN

An Amazon Basics power strip I bought failed and took some of the hardware hooked up to it with it.

bcassedy May 23, 2021 View on HN

What sorts of problems are caused by power supply issues?

zaarn Feb 18, 2019 View on HN

Possibly, though I would still check capacitors and any voltage regulation (transformer and linear) to make sure it won't blow up suddenly because some wire coating rotted through.

DiabloD3 Feb 11, 2018 View on HN

I'm not him, but probably either shoddy PSUs and/or there were lithium batteries involved. It's the curse of "modern" equipment.

tobtoh Oct 11, 2016 View on HN

Couldn't it be the charging circuit? Or some fault in the power circuits that draws too much current too quickly? ie it might be something that is easy to replace like the battery, but something that requires a fundamental redesign of the electronics.

CydeWeys Apr 22, 2025 View on HN

It does seem like there's potentially some kind of bad electrical system / lack of grounding issue going on.

euroderf Sep 11, 2024 View on HN

Isn't this like 95% fixable with a capacitor ? Aren't there cables with small embedded caps ?