« Whats a Warranty Worth? | Main | The Curse of Apartment Dwelling: Neighbors »

June 25, 2007

A Fortnight of Breakage

It started one Monday with the temperature soaring past 30C with a humidex topping 40C. The little A/C that keeps my apartment cool was doing a bang up job keeping it more than comfortable when I arrived home for lunch at noon. The afternoon was even pleasant as the A/C at work found another gear it never uses and kept the office cooler than usual. As I arrived home after work I found the A/C had died at 3pm and the temperature had been rising since. The landlord wouldn't get it fixed till Friday and it was a hot couple days at home with the temperature hovering around 28-29C most of the time. The repair guy came and removed the unit Friday, leaving a hole in the wall. He was in the neighbourhood Saturday so returned it early. It was interesting they chose to repair instead of replace, but it makes sense. The unit fits the hole perfectly and they don't make them like they used to. The repair guy was eastern European and all I could make out was that he replaced some wires to fix it.

Sometime during that weekend my Powerbook kept shutting down with a dead battery. This was odd as it was AC powered. Fidgeting with it seemed to get it working again. After 2 or 3 goes at this, I figured the AC adapter was busted and swapped in a spare I luckily had, problem solved.

A few days later on Monday evening we had a heavy thunderstorm. As I awoke the next morning my outdoor humidity sensor had stopped reporting. I figured it had gotten wet and went out to flick it to try and dry it out quicker. It seems with the jostling a solder joint on the outdoor temperature sensor failed. I replaced the connector and it was up and running again, but the humidity sensor never recovered. I guess it shorted out, seems they didn't apply a conformal coating to the circuit board as one would expect.

My TiVo had been showing signs of ailing for a while, but on Thursday it had gotten to the point where it had to be dealt with. I pulled the HD, tested it and low and behold it was failing. The second time in 3 months the HD in this TiVo had failed. So I pulled out the warranty replacement from the last failure, copied the data (only takes 5 hours or so :\) and luckily it was back up and running again with a clean bill of health.

Comments

Post A Comment




Remember me?





Created By: Steven Nikkel (steven_nikkel@ertyu.org)
This webpage and others materials are Copyright © 1997-2016 Steven Nikkel, All Rights Reserved
counter