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Had a chat with an old timer that made me rethink my whole approach to hardware diagnostics
I was working on a Dell OptiPlex last Tuesday, swapping out a dead power supply, and this guy in his 60s rolls up to our shop in Daytona. He watched me for a minute and said "you know, you kids rely too much on the POST codes, you gotta listen to the machine." He was talking about how he used to diagnose bad capacitors by the smell alone, like a faint fishy odor when they leaked. It hit different because I've been using multimeters and software logs for years and never even thought about that. He showed me a trick with a rubber hose pressed to the case to hear the bearings grinding in a fan. Made me realize I've been skipping the simple senses stuff like touch and smell. Has anyone else had a customer or mentor drop some weird old school method that actually worked? I'm curious what other tricks I might be missing.
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bettywood22d ago
Did that old timer happen to offer you a set of encyclopedias from 1978 too? I get what he's saying, sure, but there's a reason we moved past sniffing capacitors and listening to fans with rubber tubes. That fishy smell thing is real, I've smelled it myself a few times, but I've also just about burned my nose on a perfectly good power supply that smelled like someone's basement. It's a nice party trick, but I wouldn't trust my diagnostic work to a nose that's been ruined by too many sinus infections. Let me know when his magical rubber hose can tell me the exact voltage drop across a failed resistor, because my multimeter does that every single time.
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jana_fox5022d agoTop Commenter
Start by asking what exactly is at stake here. I mean, @bettywood, is diagnosing a dead power supply really that high stakes? I've fixed hundreds of these things and yeah, a multimeter beats a nose every time. But sometimes you're just trying to see if a board is even worth cracking open before you go digging for your tools. Sniffing a cap or listening to a fan isn't replacing your Fluke, it's just a quick check. Who's really betting the farm on their sense of smell these days?
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the_sandra4d ago
Take a step back and ask if this is really worth getting worked up over. Nobody's suggesting we ditch multimeters for sniff tests, obviously the proper tool is better. It's just a quick way to see if something's obviously dead before you spend twenty minutes pulling your bench apart.
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