Several days ago a friend gave me 3 defective displays that were in the dumpster at his office. They where complaining that the image was unstable, they where shutting off, etc.

That made me curios if the CCFL’s where dying or they had some power supply problems, as all 3 are very old monitors with a lot of run hours

Disassembling them revealed that at least the power supply had better days. Most of the low voltage capacitors where faulty.

Some of them vented:

while others leaked trough the pins and corroded the bottom of the PCB:

Luckily the corrosion affected the pins more than the the traces, and everything cleaned up nice:

After replacing the caps everything worked from the first try. The displays are bright (50% brightness) and the colors look OK -> the CCFL tubes are still good:

Now I have to find an usage for them. I think I’ll keep one for myself, as it has a VGA input and I can use it with some older stuff / FPGA’s / etc, and give the other 2 for free – first come first served
This is the list of parts that I used to repair them (description and part number):

• 15uF/50V, 860160672010
• 820uF/25V, EEU-FR1E821
• 330uF/10V, ESY337M010AG3AA
• 470uF/25V, EEU-FR1E471Y
• 1000uF/10V, EEU-FM1A102

And a picture of the replaced parts: