A few weeks ago I got a used pair of gen 1 radion xr30ws, the only problem was that the fans didn't ever seem to come on and so they would shut off due to overheating if they got turned up more than 5%. Today, with the help of my dad fixed the fans! Lucky for me, I was a circuit board technician for 6 years and my dad is an electrical (semiconductor) engineer. There are also 2 leds on one puck that are not coming on. That will be another project.
Tools needed- Phillips head screwdriver, a flathead (for removing the back panel if it doesnt come out easily) and an entire set of Allen wrenches. Ecotech used a ton of different Allen key sizes, which I didn't keep track of which sizes... so just make sure you have all of the ones for smaller heads.
To disassemble the lights, you need to remove the 8 screws and then remove the back panel. Disconnect the lights from the circuit board and the power.
Remove the two Allen screws from the circuit board and carefully remove the it. Note that there is a ribbon cable underneath that connects the board to the buttons on the unit. You will also need to remove all of the screws holding down the heat sink since the screws for the fan are on the underside of the plastic piece. I also cleaned the heat sink since I had it apart. I also taped over the led pucks since I didn't want to blind myself every time I tested the light. My light also had hot glue holding down the fans. This did peel off fairly easily.
After disassembly, it had to be determined that it was the fans that were bad and not a circuit board problem. Measuring between the Leads of the fan, we should have seen some resistance but instead we saw the value slowly rising. This is because the coils in the fan are faulted and have created an open circuit so what we are seeing is the capacitor charging. In the gen 1 fans, there is a "filter" consisting of a 100 micro Farad axial capacitor and a choke. The choke is essentially a coil of wires that acts as a sort of check valve for the electricity, preventing it from backfeeding electricity into the circuit.
Together the capacitor and the choke serve as a filter to keep electrical "noise" out of the cpu. To tell if these components are bad, you can measure them with a multimeter. The capacitor should read around 100 and the choke should read a very low resistance. In my case I read 105 uf and .87. If yours does not read this, you will need to replace the part.
Capacitor
Choke
Since the components of the filter are good, we can move on to working on the fan. My connectors on the board were broken as well so instead of replacing the connector, I simply hard wired it into the board. Note that the positive (red) goes to the side with the square pad surrounding the hole.
Since the replacement fan with the filter cost $60 a piece, I used the same filter by just reconnecting it to the replacement fan. I bought each fan for under $10 each. The holes are not tapped but some of the screws in the fan are self tapping. The other screws go into the plastic easily enough that even though they are not specifically self tapping, it will make the threads.
Type: Cooling Fan. Current: 0.35A. For COFAN F-8015H12BII.
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Here I'm showing the direction of the filter. The input from the board should be soldered to the black wire. Then solder the other side (fan side) of the wire to where the capacitor and choke are connected. Then solder the red wire to the other end with the capacitor so that it branches off of the wire. Enjoy my quick and terrible drawing of the filter components.
Once I had it connected I tested the light after plugging the power to the circuit board in and voila, the fan came on. I then put new shrink tubing around the filter and reassembled the light.
Note about reassembly. Make sure that the fuse is not dirty before you reassemble it.
Stay tuned for a replacement of individual leds in a few weeks.
