Monday, August 26, 2013

Some DIY electrics on a radio

Every morning I get up, the first things I do are, put my phone on charge, pick up radio and then descend to the kitchen for breakfast. The radio gets plugged in straight away. The radio is the daily wake up call. As well as the hundreds of pigeons clattering out of the roof tiles in the morning. They've been there a long time and it seems like roofers don't have a clue on how to stop them. Well one roofer to be precise. The radio takes a few moments to warm up, it's something Sparkling got me years ago and every time I put it on I think of Sparkling. The kettle is filled, toast slotted in the toaster and then I return back to the radio. The problem is over the last year the thing seems to have got a mind of it's own. It doesn't work by pressing the on/off button but by pressing any other button. Then when it is on and working for no apparent reason the thing turns itself off. Now this is very inconvenient especially when I've got a face full of shaving foam and cant touch the thing.  Some days it is particularly worse than other days and will happen every couple of minutes. In a self diagnosis pondering I thought it must be something to do with the electrics, maybe a thing called a capacitor wasn't working properly.  But as I don't know a great deal about electrical things it was likely if it carried on like this it would get binned. This morning things changed.

By chance as I pulled the wires on the radio I noticed the power wire was not connected properly so gave it a firm push back into the back of the radio. It had never occurred to me, this could actually be the thing which was wrong with it. It got plugged back into the electrical socket and immediately lit up, but it looked different. I pressed the on/off button and it burst into sound. The voice of my morning new presenter rang out. The thing was working properly. I changed pre-set channel and rather than turning itself off it actually did change to a different channel. It was fixed. All these months I had been trying to get the thing to work and what was wrong with it was easily fixable. Bloody lucky I didn't take it to a repairman to look at. I'd of been charged for no work at all.

Someone who knew a little about electrics once said to me, if you purchase an electrical device and it does not break in the first month then it is unlikely to have any problems. He didn't go on to explain the issues were usually related to the users not knowing what they were doing. Even in the matter of turning on a radio things can go wrong. Well not any more.

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