Exploding Till

[Lace Neil Singer]

We recently had some new tills put in at work. The evening after, I was working a late shift with my collegue Lisa, and one of the tills made a sound like a pop gun and the screen went blank. It sounded as tho it had exploded and there was smoke coming out of it. We called over a manager who inspected it and said there was no fire risk; the smoke was a result of the electrics going and it was gone anyway. We had to close the petrol station anyway cuz a minute after the till exploded, the other till went blank. Yeah, new tills. So fantastic, they die the next day.

[dalesys]

All the little electrons were singing "We Gotta Get Outta This Place" as they pelted for the exit earth.

[DerangedHermit]

I imagine something probably shorted or something like that.

[EricKei]

The tills must have been warned about your clientele, and decided that self-termination was preferable to dealing with them >_>

[AdamAnt316]

Probably an electrolytic capacitor which blew up. Those things are known for (minor) pyrotechnics, especially if wired in backwards. Back in the early part of the last decade, some of them were involved in an industrial espionage incident gone wrong, known as the capacitor plague. Not sure if any of those faulty caps outright exploded, but they certainly puffed up their tops, and leaked nasty goo.

I remember a couple of exploding 'lytics stories from my days in high school. Once involved an power inverter being built by a couple of my fellow students. It was supposed to turn 12V DC into 120V AC, but something wasn't right with it, causing it to output about double that, accompanied by a troubling whining noise. I stayed far back from the thing, and sure enough, *BANG!* one or two large electrolytic capacitors went flying halfway across the shop! Another time, one of the students was building an infrared detector from a kit. It wasn't working, and one of the shop instructors was trying to troubleshoot it. Just as he was saying "It looks like that capacitor might be wired in backwards," the little can burst it's top, and sent a puff of smoke into his face.

[wolfie]

My family's first computer (XT clone - late '80s) had a few caps blow (from appearance they were the tantalum bead type). Didn't affect operation, so they must have been distributed power supply filtering for the logic chips on one expansion card.

First one blew when I was doing really well in Lode Runner, and I immediately shut down (bummer). Took it to the store, and they couldn't find the problem. A few weeks later, another one blew, and this time, after shutting it off, I had a look inside. I noticed one capacitor with pieces missing, closed the case, and took it to the store. Again they couldn't find anything. I looked inside, and asked "could this have something to do with it?" Expansion card replaced, and no more blowups.

[EricKei]

I had not heard of the "plague" before (The More You Know... ^_^), but I do know that certain runs of Intel boards in the very early 2000's were known for having bad capacitors. I had exactly one client who had this problem -- in 2010 o_O (yes, they used the system for that long). One day, their comp just went *bzzt* and abruptly flatlined. When I took a look at it, sure enough, several of the capacitors were ruptured, spilling out little iron-filing-ish crud onto the board. Fortunately, only the board itself shorted out/got fried as a result. Their hard drive was fine.

As it happened, they had just replaced another comp with a modern one (Win 7) -- So, they just went right back to the store and replaced this one, so I pulled their data over from the old drive. They were frustrated, but ultimately, happy.

[RichS]

I've dealt with the 'plague' for awhile now, first as a tech, now with the school. I have IBM and 2 different models of Dell computers that have had instances. A lot of companies were affected by this.

At the computer store, I actually had one guy wanting me to commit insurance fraud over bad caps.

[Fire_on_High]

but I do know that certain runs of Intel boards in the very early 2000's were known for having bad capacitors. I had exactly one client who had this problem -- in 2010 o_O (yes, they used the system for that long). One day, their comp just went *bzzt* and abruptly flatlined. .

I lost a machine to this. Smelled burny for a while but I could never pin down what, so eventually I just decided I'd have to quit hunting and hope for the best. Got back in the room one day just in time to hear it shut down. Same thing, tho...everything was pulled and reused except the power supply, mobo, and cpu, which was cheap, old, and a bit suspect also, and everything was fine that we reused. Wasn't Intel based, tho.