Save a Ton of Money by Trying to Fix Things Yourself – I Fixed My TV for $9

One Saturday night a few weeks ago I sat down in my little man cave to rock my son and myself with some Dora the Explorer. When I turned on my Samsung LCD TV it just made a clicking noise. It never turned on. It just kept clicking.

That made me really mad. I spent $1,200 on this 46 inch TV back in 2009, right before the Super Bowl. It was the crown jewel of the man cave I had slowly spent the previous three months remodeling. Now, without the one thing that makes the room a man cave, it was a storage room with memorabilia on the walls.

Apparently this clicking problem was very common. Many Samsung TVs made around the time that mine was made had this problem. Mine was certainly not an isolated incident. Thousands of people online will tell you they had the same problem.

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I Googled the problem and found a few articles about how to fix it yourself. There were probably one or two capacitors that blew in the power supply circuit board. The article I read said you remove the bad capacitors with a soldering iron, replace them with new ones, preferably of a higher voltage but same capacitance, and the TV should work again.

That sounded like it was way over my head until a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video that showed how to do it. Seeing that made it look easy. Plus, what did I have to lose? A repair bill would probably be a couple of hundred dollars. Replacing the TV would cost at least $400-700. (It is amazing how the price of 46 inch TVs has dropped in six years.)

So I got a soldering iron and solder for $23 removed the old capacitors that had visibly blown their tops. I struggled with this since I hadn't soldered anything since I was in high school. I eventually got them out by pulling on them while I heated the solder.

Then I had to order the capacitors online. For my project I had blown two 10 volt, 1,000 μF, 105 degree Celsius capacitors. The article suggested a higher voltage at the same 1,000 μF and it would work fine.

So I searched for a website that looked like a normal supplier of this stuff since I couldn't find the parts in Sioux Falls. Finally I found them for 79 cents plus six dollars for shipping for four of them, in case I needed backups. Got them in 3 days, soldered them in and voila! My TV worked!

I'm going to always investigate DIY solutions for stuff like this. Except with my vehicles. I learned too many times the hard way that I shouldn't do car stuff.

The total price tag of fixing this myself was actually around $32. But since I now have another tool I can reuse, I did not factor that into the price of it. That put's the parts and free labor at $9. Not a bad deal.