HP Photosmart C5180 Power Cycling

[Big Daddy Kane]

Hello... Just wanted to post on here a solution to an issue that many people are having with their HP all-in-one multifunction printer/scanner/copiers.

I have an HP Photosmart C5180, and after about 4 years of light use, it started displaying "ink system failure". It was able to be cleared up with a hard reset, but would always come back after one print job. Then finally it stopped turning on at all... would just power cycle non stop displaying the HP logo and loading bar on the screen the whole time. Sometimes the exclamation point would light up when it was cycling. Pretty much creating a giant paperweight.

Finally found a post on the HP support forums by pcully, who included a link to this site and an explaination+picture of what a bad capacitor looks like. Sure enough, I had two bad capacitors on my power supply board. Both were from the same manufacturer, and both had the lowest voltage ratings of all the caps on the board.

So I researched some more about replacing capacitors (mostly on motherboards), and the consensus was that voltage didn't really matter much on electrolytic capacitors (as long as it was higher than needed), but you needed to match the uF rating, or risk having some weird issues.

I bought two of each cap in case I messed something up since I've never soldered on a circuit board before. They arrived today, and I worked on replacing them. Desoldering sucked and didn't work at all like all the howtos I read. The solder wick sucked up excess solder, but didn't release the capacitor's pins from the circuit board. Then my butane powered iron's tip was way too big for soldering this kind of stuff. So I busted out my 25W plug in iron that was included with a computer repair kit from the 90s since it had a fine point tip. It worked great!

Anyway... just figured this would help out other HP owners with a power cycling issue.

Here's the link to the HP forums with our posts: http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-p.../576251#M33924

Also... thank you Topcat for having this site! Fixed my awesome printer for $7!

[Uranium-235]

heh, tapeo, when will they learn

[TheLaw]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

heh, tapeo, when will they learn

Probably never.

[philc2001]

Originally Posted by Big Daddy Kane

Here's the link to the HP forums with our posts: http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-p.../576251#M33924

Also... thank you Topcat for having this site! Fixed my awesome printer for $7!

Yes, thank you Topcat!

I followed this same set of instructions and fixed by HP C5180 printer also. It's a good thing since I had about $80 worth of spare ink too.

I can't believe this epidemic of bad caps is allowed to continue.