Archive for December 11th, 2011

Today I’m going to show a video on how to troubleshoot and repair a timer control. I will be sharing my evaluation of the problem and my final solution. Along the way I demonstrate three different methods on how to remove electronic components and I give some hints to make it easier. I show how to fix a fused relay and in just this blog posting, not the video, I also document how to test a bipolar junction transistor (BJT).

The three methods I cover are:
1) Manual desoldering pump at (adafruit.com)
2) 30 Watt Electric desoldering Tool at (amazon.com) or (elexp.com)
3) Solder wick at (adafruit.com)

If you don’t care to watch the video I will summarize below.

I have an exterior timer control that turns my Christmas lights on at dusk and off after 6 hours. I noticed they never turned off one day and thought I had left the timer control set to the ON position. But no, it was set to off 6 hours after dusk. I then set the selection switch to OFF but still it was on. I unplugged and plugged it back in but got the same problem. It was time to go to the electronics bench.

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