Saturday, June 2, 2012

11 blinks of Death! (Panasonic Plasma)

So my trusty Panasonic Viera TH-42PX60U which I bought in 2007 finally met its maker... but I wasn't going down without a fight. You see, if you reader don't know by now, I'm a #CompulsiveBuyer ... I always say that if something breaks, I'll just go ahead and buy a replacement and that's it.

So I did, I bought a huge 55-incher Sony TV which really kicks the Pannies ass all over the place but still... it was my Panny...

Bored one weekend, I decided to troubleshoot. Noticed that I turned on the TV, received the signal, the display came on but then... it turned off and the power light started blinking... and I started counting. It blinked 11 times. Thank God for the internet! People were saying that if the TV blinked 11 times the error pointed to the "Fan Board Module". Good enough for me! Took my screwdriver, and started disassembling the TV:


After like half and hour disassembling, I started playing with the connections, replacing fans, etc. andddd FAIL! LOL could not get it to work. BUT.. BUT... I did take it to a technician and all is well now... it seems to work Ok and it was exactly that (the guy just put new Fans and that's it... it was fairly cheap too!)

So, for being impatient, now I have an extra 42-inch TV in one of my rooms not getting any "play" time... hehehe Ohhh well....


Bonus Pics:




New TV...



2 comments:

Unknown said...

what did the technician do that was different to what you did when replacing the fan? I am having the same issue and I did buy my TV in 2007 as well....

Thanks,
Ben

Angel Melendez said...

He put in proper fans in the unit. The fans I tried to install were computer fans!! LOL (the only ones I had.)

If you can see in the pictures, the fan plugs it uses have 3 cables (red, white and black) and the one I was using had 2. I think the 3rd cable missing from mine actually "signals" something to the TV but I'm not sure.

So anyway, he just replaced the fans with spare TV fans he had and it worked.

If it doesn't work for you, then it could be the whole fan module (i.e. the PCB that has the fan connections).

So if you could find some extra fans, you could try replacing them and see how it goes.! BTW, the guy just asked for $60 or so for the fix (which I think is fair since dismantling the back panel is time consuming, at least for me it was ;-)).

Good luck! Let me know how it went.


Thanks.