Symmetra LX Intelligence Module faults won’t go away? A fix.

[djb_rh]

So I’m new around here, but I’ve had a pair of Symmetra LX’s for going on 20 years now that I’ve been maintaining (just recently started posting in the battery thread about how to refurb those at home, many thanks to those who published that info originally!).

I’ve searched and not found anything about this, but I thought it worth mentioning that a few years ago I had my first intelligence module fail. It started slowly with errors that it wasn’t working right, then it would apparently come back after being on the other one for a while. It was infrequent at first and since those are redundant I kinda let it go. But it started happening enough that I found an NOS module on eBay and popped it in. I decided to open up the bad one thinking it might be bad electrolytic capacitors. Lo and behold, I could see at least one was vented with another one looking sketchy.

I don’t remember exactly how many there were, I think four or five, on the entire thing. I simply got the values and ordered up five sets of them from Digikey. Then I replaced the ones in the bad module and put it back in my UPS in place of the NOS one. I let it cook for a month which was MORE than enough time for the fault to come back given how it was acting before the swap and no errors. So then I swapped the capacitors on the NOS one (they probably had some time left in them, but they do die due to age *and* use) and swapped it in for one of the other originals and started swapping caps on them all one at a time until I did them all.  Haven’t had another error in many years since.

I know that’s not *specific* info, but anyone who has the skills to solder and is comfortable working on something like this can easily pop one open and figure out the handful that you need to swap. But if anyone has detailed questions about it, I’ll do my best to answer. Those capacitors are cheap and only took a few minutes to change, so well worth it over buying new modules that probably won’t last THAT long either. I’m gonna keep these things cobbled together as long as I can!