Bad cooling fan experience

[peteb2]

  So how terrible can it get? A simple repair when the 3-wire fans in a set of professional equipment that began showing fan-fail alarms, the best route was to search using the part code on their tag. Soon identified a supplier, and a batch were purchased that arrived a week or two later. The 1st unit had them installed only for the fail alarm to remain and oh dear the LOUD shrieking, screaming noise!!!

Studying the newly purchased units they looked 100% OK, good bearings, good molding, spinning the proper direction with airflow according to the arrows on the body... the only issue, things were just waaaay too noisy to be of any use not to mention the alarm. There's one difference that didn't matter the old units were made in the Philippines, the new 'noiseys' Made in Japan...

So the only option was to buy directly from the manufacturer of the pro-equipment as in official spares & too bad the price. Sure enough when the real devices arrived & installed... loads of airflow, no noise at all and the fan-alarm gone.

So what do you do with a pile of rowdy screamer fans not to mention they are probably fakes which is such a pity considering the effort to make them?

In the photo the one on the left with the bad shiny label is the screamer, the genuine new stock spare on the right.

[andy3055]

I bet the bad one is a fake that is not really made in Japan!

[amyk]

Do they sound like this?


I suspect someone may have relabeled faster genuine ones, or alternatively, the tach output is missing and they're normally speed-controlled so were run in fail-safe full speed mode (hence the fail alarm too.) But no matter what, a 40mm 20k+ RPM fan is not going to be quiet at full speed...

[peteb2]

That's the racket the one on the left makes. Utterly useless. Such a wasted effort to manufacture something the copy of another but for it to perform so badly.

[mikerj]

Either the fan chassis is original or an exceptionally good copy, but that label is an obvious fake.  I wonder if it's a "recycled" part with new Chinese guts installed.

[peteb2]

The other thought here is how often is the BS happening, this issue of FAKE PARTS? In this one situation with professional equipment being maintained it involved quite a few man-hours-worked chasing down a simple little fault that shouldn't have taken long. The Business has had to absorb the unrecoverable cost hours of at least three maint engineers who at some point became involved & spent time on it not counting downtime on the equipment being out of service. This is of course a commercial situation and simply part of doing business.

The concern with Fake Parts is what happens when they end up in a piece of medical equipment that linked to a person's loss of life or part of a project that resulted in the utter failure of that project at extreme cost. Imagine a failure in time of War with a piece of military equipment because the fake part broke down....

I assume it makes for added industry costs with extra high security and fully traceable supply inventory plus pretesting on all component parts for everyone and not just research facilities or military.