Energizer Universal Battery Charger repair

Groan, the dishwasher is broken again. Out with the multimeter.
Groan, the multimeter's rechargeable battery is flat. To the battery charger.
Groan, also not working.

Sometimes you end more steps back than forward.

Q. How do you sort out what is wrong with your battery charger when the battery in your multimeter has gone flat?
A. Buy a spare alkaline battery.

Well off to see Mr. Tesco for a quick fix,

Multimeter back into operation

Now the multimeter is working, but the battery charger (and dishwasher) are still broken.

First things first, is the charger getting juice from the power supply unit (PSU)? It should be outputting 12 V DC, but is actually supplying 0 V. Culprit identified.

After popping the cover off the PSU and giving it the once over there are no obvious shorts or burnt out components. So no easy fix for this.

Battery charger PSU internals

The part # for the Energizer Switching Mode Power Supply is CHEUF-ADP-UK. I don't have any experience with switched mode power supplies, but apparently they are popular as they are small, lightweight (in terms of transformer size) and power efficient. The circuitry in the Battery Charger PSU includes a mix of discrete through hole and surface mount components. As I am not sure how the circuit is laid out or which of the components is faulty, troubleshooting is not likely to be a quick or painless option. So time to think of some other routes to getting the charger functional again.

The first option is to replace the PSU in its entirety, not very green I grant you but better than chucking the whole charger and replacing (you would think).

But not if you want an Energizer PSU. For a start Energizer don't sell them,

Thanks for contacting ENERGIZER.
Unfortunately, we do not sell spare parts.

We remain at your disposal,
Thanks
Kind regards

Energizer consumer service

which is not the epitome of responsible corporate stewardship. Or in their words "we believe everyone has the power to make a positive impact", aka " we believe everyone can buy into our corporate greenwashing, while we can't be bothered to ship out replacement PSUs even though it would be a stupidly easy thing to do, just throw your charger in the bin and buy a new one like a good consumer, screw the planet. " At least they ponied up the information quickly though.

The on-line sources were not attractive [Amazon - unavailable, eBay (used) - £12.95, on-line search - £17.00], which are almost as much as buying a brand-new charger [£17 vs £20], which on point of principle I am now refusing to do.

The next option is to buy an OEM wall wart with the same rating, much more reasonable at £3.88 arriving on a slow boat from China. A cynic would note how it looks almost identical to the Energzier one. However it is still remotely possible that I could fix the original unit which would then leave me with two. Not that that would be a major issue.

OEM charger PSU

Thinking about using an OEM PSU lead me to realise I hadn't been through the parts bin. Happily a search through the bin yielded a PSU from a long since deceased scanner which is 12 V/1.0 A rated. A bit higher than the 12 V/0.6 A of the original charger but available immediately at £0.00.

Sounds OK, but the DC power plugs are not the same, grr. Both are 5.5 mm OD, but the spare is 2.1 mm rather than 2.5 mm ID so won't fit the charger.

Different internal bores of DC power plugs

Back on-line for more searching to find a DC power adaptor for £1 off eBay.

Battery Charger fix complete

…

Wait a month for the slow boat from China to arrive.

…

Unpack and plug in replacement charger. No issues, but won't leave on unattended for a while just in case.

JOB DONE

Time taken : 5min to put in new plug, 2 hr to work out what was needed, 30 days to receive part.
Cost : £0.99

Land Rover Discovery 4 tonneau cover fix

The Major appeared with her tonneau cover in two pieces. The lever to unlatch it from its socket in the boot had completely separated from the tonneau cover. It all looked to be in one two intact pieces so should be an easy fix.

Broken Landrover Discovery IV tonneau cover

From the looks of it the latch had wriggled out between the two parts of the cover. There was a large gap between the parts, when compared with the other end,

Gap between cover parts

and on inspection there appeared to be a screw missing.

No screw

Screw

A search of the parts box yielded a similarly threaded but slightly longer BZP self-tapping screw.

Original (lower) and replacement (upper) screws

As I wasn't sure it would fit, I put it into the other end from the latch and it went in OK. I then tried to fit the original screw into the latch end hole, which illustrated the underlying problem as it spun round in its hole; a stripped thread in the socket. Swapping the position of the screws around made the fix, as the longer screw cut a new thread deeper into the socket.

JOB DONE

Time taken: 1 hour
Cost : £0.00

This is a nice illustration of the importance of not ditching, recovering from scrap, or not walking past unattended odds 'n' sods fixings. Sometimes you just need one. Supplying it from the parts bin will save a couple of quid each time versus having to go out a buy a pack.

Also tonneau is quite a cool word.

The Big Push

Well another year has past and I've not done anything large (or small really) to the house. But after a leak from our unvented hot water tank The Major and I decided to get rolling on a refurb for the futility room.

The saga begins.

The old tank is lodged upstairs in one of the bigger bedrooms between the chimney breast and the front outside wall. The idea is to move the unvented tank (which can be anywhere on the hot water system as it is pressurised) from the upstairs cupboard and fit the new one into the utility room, thereby freeing up a cupboard upstairs.

Elderly Megaflo unvented hot
water tank leaking in situ

This means removing some of the fitted cupboards in the utility room to get the new tank into place and then getting it boxed in. As the current units are worn old 80's Moben ones it would seem to make sense to fit new cupboards. Also the current boxing for the pipework that runs around all sides of the room (as it has a mains gas supply, two mains water supplies, the central heating boiler and grey water piping) is pretty ropey so we may as well renew that as well. There is also the matter of an intermittent leak from the roof that has been an occasional annoyance.

Proposed location for new hot water tank
in corner of room (where toolboxes are)

So the plan of action is

• Get plumber in so we can have hot water without soaking the hall and the front door jamming open.
• Have builder in to look at the wall, get any required repairs done and make good any damage.
• Bring in a kitchen fitter to box out the new tank and pipework and get new units installed.
• Complete any general decorating.

Everything should done by Christmas and the first room will be off the refurb list. Seems straightforward...

Shower swamp - The Creature from the Black Lagoon

The drainage of the shower has been getting steadily worse, so that now the shower tray turns into a foot bath when used. The Major has been applying one of her many potions to it, but the results have been only a temporary alleviation of the symptoms.

Eventually it annoyed me enough to bring out the sink plunger and give it a good thrashing.

Action stations!

Unfortunately rather than clearing a partial blockage in the shower tray I enhanced it into a complete blockage and blocked both drains of the basin and bath as well. Result 😒.

On the plus side this meant that whatever the blockage was I had moved it into the common drain for the bathroom which was outside and should have been easy to get to. An inspection confirmed that, although access was a little restricted, I must have dislodged the blockage into the downpipe as the hopper was full.

Camouflaged waste water drainage system

First order of business was to assemble the gear for hacking through the undergrowth.

Jungle-busting gear

Then cut along the garden path,

Before                                      After 

along the path in front of the kitchen window,

Before                                    After 

and finally into the corner.

Before                                        After    

A green wheelie bin full of greenery later proper access to the hopper and downpipe was afforded; time taken - an hour and a half.

A bit of rodding with a garden cane and whatever was causing the issue disappeared into the drains and the problem was solved; time taken - 5 minutes.

Flooded hopper

Post-rodding

While I was at it I cleaned out the drain,

Grotty                                                    Clean

and with that the drain problem was solved and I went looking for someone to help with the clear up of the bathroom.

As to what caused the blockage in the first place, who knows?

Putting it back together

With all the requisites for brazing to hand I thought that I had better make a trial attempt before having a go at the real thing, so I cleaned up a pair of nails that I found rolling around the shed.

The first attempt was a complete failure. I hadn't secured the two nails in place and, being round, every time I brought the brazing rod in they rolled apart, doh! On the second attempt, after wiring them together, I got a bond. But the distribution of the braze was not even across the two nails (the smaller had more) indicating that I hadn't got them both to the right temperature. This was confirmed when I took them to A More Experienced Man who promptly twisted them apart and said "that hasn't worked." However I thought I had got the hang of it, mostly.

The brazing process for the fireguard took another 3 sessions, each faster than the last. I learnt a few things on the way; that the workpiece had to be red hot; that if the flame was showing green tinges I had the brazing rod too close to the flame; that lots of flux was a good thing; and that it was best to heat along the thick rod and move the brazing rod in behind the torch flame. In then end I got the thing together even though some of the mesh wires got a bit distorted and some of the joints were, from my reading, far too far apart. Fortunately the fireguard isn't structural so my crappy joints won't be overtaxed and overall it doesn't look too bad.

Brazed and unbrazed workpieces

Brazed and unbrazed workpieces

Immediately after brazing I doused the hot workpiece under the hose and removed as much of the scale (ie flux) as possible with a wire scratch brush and a pair of pliers. I followed that up by grinding back any excess braze with a Dremel grinding stone and more brushing with a steel wire attachment on the Dremel to remove the last of the scale. Finally I used& emery cloth and wet & dry paper until I had everything smoothed out and any burnt paint sanded back. I gave the whole thing a white spirit wash and it was ready for painting.

I hummed and harred about which paint to use but in the end I settled for engine enamel because it has a gloss finish and the fireguard isn't likely to get massively hot (the enamel is OK up to 150^oC). Two coats of that and job done.

Painted re-worked fireguard

Refitting the brazed panels was straightforward and everything came together as planned. The overall cost was quite high, but 60% was for tools and of the remainder probably only £10-15 of consumables were actually used. Not too bad for a custom fit piece.

Re-assembled fireguard

JOB DONE.

Time taken : A week (excluding delivery time)
Cost : £102.98 (including £59.62 for tools)

How to braze

As usual when researching a new topic, the first port of call was Wikipedia. Thirty minutes of reading later, crimey! Talk about complicated.

After a strong cup of tea and some cogitation it seemed that the easiest route would be to torch braze with either a silver or brass alloy. However I was going to have to do a lot more reading before I could make any progress. The web was, as usual for practical technical subjects, a bit patchy. But a YouTube search did at least give me some examples of what the process looked like. Unfortunately I couldn't find enough of the right sort of information to make decisions about which brazing system to use and what I would need to get hold of to carry it out.

In this situation wise words are "if you want to save a week in the shed, spend a day in the library" and I came up with two books on the subject, Soldering and Brazing by Tubal Cain (Workshop Practice Series #9) and Brazing and Soldering by Richard Lofting (Crowood Metalworking Guides).

Brazing and Soldering by R Lofting

Soldering and Brazing by T Cain

They were both useful, covering the subject from slightly different angles but broadly were aimed at the practical aspects of the process. Once read they allowed me to work out that I could use bronze brazing and a propane torch to get the job done. Thus avoiding the expense of silver-based alloys and kitting out with multiple gas cylinders for a process that I might not need again.

The shopping list for the job involved

• PPE (safety specs - already had, a pair of welding guantlets, and a fire extinguisher - hose pipe)
• Consumables to prep the workpiece (Dremel flap sanders and some soft iron wire to secure everything in place)
• A brazing hearth (a donated trolley and some old fire cement as firebricks)
• Requisites for the brazing (a blow torch and some propane gas)
• Brazing consumables (bronze brazing rods and sifbronze flux - obtained a small quantity together on eBay)
• Something to process the workpiece afterwards (quenching trough - hosepipe again, wire brush - already had, Dremel to grind back any excess braze, and wet & dry to clean up the workpiece).

So while the orders arrived I cleaned up the surfaces to be brazed, removing any paint and taking the metal back to bright steel, in preparation for putting the pieces back together.

Pot stove guard

When we moved into the house the kitchen had a pot stove in the fireplace where there had probably been a small cooking range. It's nice enough decoratively but as the chimney is functional I spent some time sorting out the register plate in the fireplace and getting our local sweep to come in and clean out the chimney. He told us that the lining of the chimney had decayed and that we should have it replaced or a stainless steel liner fitted.

As the roof on this part of the house required replacement we had the roofer drop a liner down the chimney at the same time as it was being re-roofed. A bit more time was spent converting the register plate into a closure plate. Basically this meant fitting a hit-and-miss vent to stop any moisture building up in the now enclosed space between the liner and the chimney walls.

Now the thing was ready to fire again, and was a few times, but I just couldn't rely on one of the Tykes not running into it while it was hot (and still can't even as they approach teenage years). The solution was to take the wire cage fireguard from the living room which had outlived its usefulness (as the Tykes are now old enough to know not to mess with that fire) and move it into the kitchen.

The guard had been made in two halves and is about five foot wide and a foot deep, with the centre rising in an arch, The rearrangement was obvious, simply swing the two ends together forming a cage that was longer than it was wide with the open end and the tops of the arched segments at the rear. Then push the reformed cage into the alcove round the stove.

And it even worked; sort of. Unfortunately the stove pipe stopped the two halves of the fireguard from lying next to each other. Meaning that the whole thing was sort of scissored round the stove and pipe, the clips that were supposed to join it together couldn't be used and the whole thing couldn't be fixed in place. Generally a less than satisfactory situation.

After using it like this for a while (read a year or so) I decided that as part of the kitchen MRO process I was going to sort it out. A bit of metalwork was going to be needed, my skills in which haven't advanced since the second year of comprehensive (ie they are still nil).

I decided that I could cut out the corners and flip them over to create the required rebate for the stove pipe. As my spatial reasoning is appalling, out came drinking straws and scissors so I could confirm that if I made the cuts the ends would come back flush to each other. Then it was just a matter of making the measurements for the rebate size needed to fit the guard round the stovepipe and out with the Dremel (with a slight side-step to buy a new tool, a set of cheapo measuring calipers to get an accurate diameter on the stovepipe - these were OK after I had ground the ends square). I used a protractor to mark out the cuts as near as possible to 45^o and made the cuts on the frame wire first to minimise any movement during the cutting process; followed by detaching all of the mesh wires close to their attachment point on the frame wire. After this I ground back the remnant stubs of the mesh wires from the detached frame wire piece and voila! It was able to flip over as required and formed the correct size rebate.

One section of cut fireguard

Only the small matter of how to rejoin the pieces remained. I could glue it but I was pretty sure that a) it wouldn't last and b) the heat from the stove pipe might melt it out the first time the stove was lit.

So a metal joint was probably a better bet. Welding then? A bit of reading lead me to the conclusion that I was going to have to buy a lot of kit and that I had cut the guards the wrong way (the welding process prefers a butt joint to a chamfered one).

The next option was soldering/brazing. I was still going to have to buy some kit, but the joint was cut correctly for these processes at least. For this application there wasn't much to choose between them. The stovepipe gets too hot to touch but is not likely to get hot enough to melt a solder joint. Brazing is stronger but a bit more tricky to get to work. However as I haven't done any brazing before this is what I went with.