Make do and mend

G9 sat down to watch her pre-recorded programmes... zilch, nowt, nothing.  She wrote to Channel 4; disgusted from Llysyfran.  Then we thought we'd better look closer to home and checked the PVR and found it was unable to pick up any Freeview signal.  We changed the aerial cable and then tried plugging the aerial directly into the PVR, still nothing (digital TV was receiving the signal fine).  J surmised the tuner had gone west but thought it worth taking the box apart as it really is pretty useless without the Freeview (we no longer have Analogue in our area).  The Panasonic DMR-EX95V DVD/VHS/HDD recorder is a few years old now, but when I looked on the Internet for something comparable we're up in the £400.00 range.  Yikes. 

As we were definitely way out of warranty what had we to lose?  Removing the lid we found a blown capacitor - C1808.  Can you see the culprit with the brown gunk coming out the top in the picture below?  (Apparently they fail in a controlled manner, there is a weak spot on the top of the capacitor so rather than exploding they burble).  The cost of five of these comes to a grand total of  £1.88 (we bought from RS Components).  Worth a go I think.

We snipped the old capacitor off at the 'legs' to save removing the whole motherboard.

The new (bottom) and the old capacitor - rated 6.3V, 680µF. 
The arrows\stripe depict the negative side & the 'leg' is shorter. 

Then we just cut away some of the length of the new capacitor and soldered this to the cut off 'legs' that were still poking up from the old - making sure the polarity was correct.

The 'legs' soldered together.

Success.  Hurrah, we have Freeview channels again and can record G9's programmes to our heart's content.

Special thanks must go to Dave who pointed us in the right direction with his blog post How I saved (about) £400 on a new PVR (Personal Video Recorder).  Please heed the warning at the top of his blog and if in any doubt at all, ask a professional.