A few weeks ago, we were asked to fix a Revitive Foot massage device. Customer said ‘it wasn’t working’.
We mistakenly assumed the charger was the right one for the device. Wrong.
Just because the customer hands in an item with a charger. Please check. In this case, the story was that he had bought it from an elderly neighbour’s son and when he tried it, it didn’t work. A 9v charger for a TP-Link device had been provided when sold to him instead of the manufacturers 5v supply. When the customer switched it on, an internal protection diode failed and damaged the PCB in the process.
So we will update our own repair checklist to make sure we confirm the charger is the one it should be and if not that the specification matches what’s needed.
Do other repair groups have checklists they use when working on a repair?
Oh God. This happened to me at our event last Saturday.
Someone brought in a keyboard. Symptom: makes gargling noises and pulses on and off.
Checked the power adapter. It said 6V DC. Measured the voltage. Spent an hour taking the thing apart and squirting contact cleaner around. Then a colleague pointed out that the DC in socket said 10-12V.
Someone once gave me some sage advice: Never assume, always verify.
Which I didn’t do.
I found a power supply at home which produced the current voltage and current, and had the correct DC plug, and when using that, the device performs perfectly.
To be honest, it’s worth checking the output of the power supply regardless of whether it appears to be the right one or not. I had a network switch fail in the past because the power supply failed by going wildly out of spec, doing exactly the same thing.
We had at least one older device (I think an old Christmas decoration) catch fire on site because the user brought the wrong charger. So yeah, this is important.