Hi there, I have a question about a corn light I have. I picked it up and opened it and there was a 22 microfarad capacitor that blew up. I'm thinking that's the only thing I need to repair. It's an epoxy. Anybody have any advice on how I can get in there and replace it? I'm not an expert Electronics guy, I'm very basic but I've done repairs in the past.
Scratch away if you can, you need to remove enough grey stuff, then find the right polarity.
If you're not used to electronics though I'd consider this a hazardous waste of time.
I'm used to electronics and don't bother repairing single "bulb" assemblies...
Hazardous because it's partly or entirely mains referenced. A waste of time because with a failure that violent I'd expect that's a symptom of another, potted, problem.
If this is a ESR sensitive position (again, potting in the way to reverse engineer) a NP cap may not survive.
22uF sounds like the main reservoir cap, probably rated 400V. The fact that it exploded suggests you might want o see what caused that first, or the replacement may do the same.
I've not heard of the term "cornlight" before - I guess this is "COB on the corn"...?
It's a 50v and yeah cob on a corn sounds right!
The cap could have failed due to poor design, cheap manufacturing, heat stress, over voltage, water ingress or a lightning strike. It's anyone's guess, but LED bulb failures are often less catastrophic than this.
The LEDs may have failed too. Test the strips with a diode meter or low voltage DC source.
Seriously, trash the mains PSU part and keep the LED arrays as they might be usefull for some other project using a safe and proven DC supply.
50v is not the mains reservoir cap, but probably output smoothing, in which case the cause of failure is likely the LED string went open-circuit, causing the constant-current driver to raise its output voltage to the max and exceeded the 50v.
If it wasn't potted I'd say it's a reasonably easy repair, but potted adds a huge amount of labor and difficulty. If I really wanted to salvage something I think I'd cut off the existing driver and wire the LED part to a different driver.