Planned Product Obsolescence of a Water Purifier

Posted under DIY, Educational, Hacks on August 22nd, 2020 by

People who use Aquaguard or any water purifier in their homes find the common issue of a stable green indicator light(or whatever colour according to your model) which is a so-called LED to tell you to change your filter cartridge. In most of these models please understand that this light has nothing to do with a measured quality/life of a filter. It’s just an electronic timer which counts the time and turns on this light. Please don’t get fooled by this.

The way to reset this is, to open the back panel of your filter and find a small reset switch. Keep it pressed on while the power is on for around 30secs or so to reset the light. Then it will be back to normal. This is just kept there to get you to buy new filters from the company. The famous “Recurring Revenue model”.

To calculate the time to change your filter, just measure your daily water consumption from the purifier and calculate the number of days it will run for. A good cartridge is slated for at least 6000L of water purification(It would be mentioned on the cartridge). Please make informed decisions on facts and don’t get fooled by the planned obsolescence tactics by companies.

Jago Grahak Jago!

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LED Bulb Teardown and Repair

Posted under DIY, Educational, Repair, Teardown on August 2nd, 2020 by
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A post shared by Amaldev Venugopal (@amaldev.000)

Had this 12W LED bulb running almost daily for the last 3yrs. It started misbehaving yesterday with a constant blinking 5mins after turning ON. I thought I should try repairing just to see what it would take. Never had opened up a LED bulb in real life.


First was to pop open the lid of the bulb. Tried various techniques including heating, but it never budged. Had to put it through a Dremel finally. Removed the top lid cleanly cutting all the way around, to reveal the 38LEDs. It’s wired as 2 series rows of 19 LEDs each with an output DC voltage of approx 57V. The LED PCB has a big heatsink with metal on the backside to attach itself to the main body heatsink. Removing this from the main body was the hardest part of the whole exercise. The LED is not meant to be repaired by the manufacturer considering the amount of silicone glue put in. After tons of brute force, was able to wedge a screwdriver in to release the heatsink and reveal the driver circuits.

To release the LED driver board from the body, you need to heat the 2 iconic blobs of solder which you commonly see on the holder portion of the bulb. Once this solder is removed, the driver slides out entirely. The circuit consists of input fuse, bridge rectifier, a generic driver LED to ensure constant current on the LEDs and a large 100uF, 80V electrolytic capacitor at the output.


Troubleshooting time. ?
Blinking of the output is usually due to the output stage collapsing and most of the time the culprit is the output cap which degrades over time. Although in this case, I couldn’t find anything visually wrong with the capacitor(No characteristic bulges), I thought to replace it anyway. Voila, it fixed it. The old capacitor was faulty. Didn’t have to take out my big pieces of equipment to solve this one. ?
A well-spent Saturday afternoon ?

LED Bulb Teardown Repair
LED Bulb Teardown Repair
LED Bulb Teardown Repair
LED Bulb Teardown Repair
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