Hit 1,000 capacitor replacements last week and it made me stop and think

I was cleaning up my bench after a long job and just out of curiosity I added up how many caps I've swapped out since I started keeping track back in 2018. It came to 1,043 exactly. That number kind of hit me because most of those were on LCD monitors and old motherboards where a bad cap was the only thing wrong. It made me realize how often we toss stuff that just needs a $2 part. Has anyone else ever added up a specific repair they do over and over?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugog438d ago

1043 caps since 2018, man that's a lot of solder smoke to breathe in. I get the point about throwing stuff away too easy but sometimes the time to diagnose which cap is bad, find the right one, desolder the old one without lifting a pad, and hope it doesn't blow up in your face just isn't worth it for a 10 year old monitor you can grab for 40 bucks on Facebook. Not saying you're wrong about the waste, just saying there's a reason most people don't keep a tally. Plus those cheap caps from the big lots can fail again in a year anyway so you might be fixing the same thing twice.

emery6038d ago

Heard a repair guy say cheap caps are just "pre-failed parts" and honestly that stuck with me.

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