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Do people fix PSUs?

• noobermin 4y ago
  Yes?????????
  • nwiswell 4y ago
    Awesome! I've got about a hundred server power supplies that need fixing, what do you charge?
    • justahuman74 4y ago
      Too much. You fix a PSU cause you know what you're doing and have the time, not because it's economical to do for someone else
      • nwiswell 4y ago
        Hmm! It certainly seems like if it's worthwhile for anyone to do with unspecialized labor, then it would certainly be worth doing for a specialist. Why is it that I've never heard of a power supply repair technician in a data center?
        • tinco 4y ago
          Because data centers don't care about ewaste. It is cheaper to have power supplies redundant and in stock than it is to have a technician on retainer.
          • nwiswell 4y ago
            Server power supplies are expensive, and data centers sure do care about the bottom line. If it costs $20 to fix a $100 power supply, why would you replace it?
            • tinco 4y ago
              How frequent are the failures? It costs a lot less than $20 to repair a broken power supply, but if you break less than $5000 worth of power supplies per month you're not breaking even on the technician not even counting the management overhead. I don't think small cost savings like that are going to be implemented simply because it makes the operation more complex without landing any manager a big fat bonus. Unless I'm grossly underestimating the failure rate of those supplies?
              • nwiswell 4y ago
                I think you're underestimating the scale of the modern data center.
                • tinco 4y ago
                  So you're saying in your DC enough of them break that they could feed a technician? Say the technician would have an 80% success rate and he saves $100 bucks per repair, there would need to be 63 failures per month for there to be 0 cost savings. What's the minimum cost savings for it to be worth a managers time? Maybe double it again so 125 failures per month? I wonder if the vendor would void the warranty and that would have any consequences. Does you DC get around 125 failures per month?
            • c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
              Actually I did a study on this (I'm a PM for a small server company) about a year ago with data scraped from a popular US based online vendor. For PSUs >1000 watts, I found that server supplies are cheaper both on a relative (more watts / dollar) and absolute cost basis than ATX form factor supplies.
              • jandrese 4y ago
                Aren't the >1k watt ATX power supplies usually the "gamer edition" ones with huge markups? They cost a lot because they are a small niche--very few PCs need power supplies that big, and the ones that do are running multiple wildly expensive GPUs so budget is clearly not a concern. There's probably more legitimate demand on the commercial side for >1kw PSUs so they can enjoy larger economies of scale.
        • tecleandor 4y ago
          I don't know if you're trolling but, probably it's all about support contracts and liability. - If your hardware hasn't reached EOL, it's probably under a warranty or support contract. So you just let your provider swap/fix it. - If you tinker with anything and there's a problem with the rest of the hardware, they'll probably won't honor the warranty or support contract, or you could have problems with your insurance. If it were a home user fixing a PSU... that's a different thing.
        • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
          > It certainly seems like if it's worthwhile for anyone to do with unspecialized labor, then it would certainly be worth doing for a specialist 'Anyone' could be a penniless student and his time costs little, specialist may charge $40 per hour. Also even ideal free market has cost of transaction, discoveravility, etc. Hospitals have repair technicians, but why would you need one spesifically focusing on power supplies - he does not need different training or equipment
    • londons_explore 4y ago
      If you have a hundred identical power supplies that need fixing, they probably all have the same fault, and the fix will probably be 3 minutes labour + 20 cents in parts after the first one. That's totally worth doing.
• bradlys 4y ago
  Clearly the 0.01% of people who have even opened a PSU are going to chime in and say it’s necessary. I’ve torn mine apart and replaced fans in them and such but I’ve never had to resolder any parts onto them. If a PSU dies - it tended to do it violently and was so cheap that it wasn’t worth doing it. All the name brand ones I’ve had never had any issues and same for the dozens of other people I knew. (Or computers I worked on or built or sold to others… or when I did IT and saw literally thousands of computers…)
• tinco 4y ago
  I fixed mine once. I lived in a university town, which caused the small unusual circumstance that no local store had a 700W power supply in stock, but there was a electronic parts store that had the capacitor I needed to replace. Besides the capacitor only costing 10 cents and a new one around a hundred bucks the advantage for me was that I had fixed the whole thing within na hour or two including diagnosing the issue and the bike ride to the shop. I was back on my PC that same night, and 5 years later that same PSU now well over ten years old is still going strong.