Thoughts on a Renewed 50g?

[Garth Wilson]

My 50g has a problem which is apparently rather common, that a power-supply capacitor leaks like crazy, and it takes 5mA from that batteries even when it's turned off. Clearly HP either got a bad batch of capacitors, or did not design with enough WVDC margin. If this capacitor in a refurbished 50g is replaced with something suitable, it will be better than new, not inferior (if that's what the "refurbished" means).

In the company I work for, we got a bad batch of capacitors around 20 years ago that went into several products, and they began failing after 10-15 years, long after the 3-year warranty was out. It was only one value (220uF), one voltage (16V), one size (6x11mm), one type (aluminum electrolytic) of capacitors. Once in a while we get one of these units in to repair, and we replace all the capacitors of that one type, voltage, value, and size, and everything is fine again. None of the others fail—ever—and obviously we're not going to replace these that did fail with more from the same bad batch. These mostly go into private aircraft, so they often remain in service for decades, much longer than typical consumer items do.