Power Supply Short Circuit

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
W

Wowzoor

Honorable
Aug 15, 2013
19
0
10,510
Idk if this is the right section... but anyway.

I bought a Corsair TX650 PSU and received it yesterday. I set it up, and turned on my pc, and it wasn'tworking. I'm new to PC building so I figure that was the issue. But when I tried to take it out the sata cable got stuck in my dvd drive and the head of it got ripped off. I figured if I put electrical tape it wouldn't effect it. But now I am thinking it may have short circuited it. I tried to run it with the paper clip method, and it will turn on for 5 seconds then shut off. I don't know what to do and it'd suck if I broke it. Please help!

@Oczdude8, I didn't individually connect them at first. Someone on a different forum told me I needed to so I tried that. I am saying, maybe I short circuited it when I didn't do it individually?
 
Solution
nukemaster
If you tied all the wires together, You could have shorted the power supply for sure.

Lucky for you, power supplies shut off or fold over when they get shorted.

Removing the tape and re-wrapping all the wires one at a time(you can tape them all together again after once they are covered.) should allow the power supply to work again. If not, you may have other issues.
Sort by date Sort by votes
O

oczdude8

Distinguished
Oct 18, 2009
1,947
6
20,965
if you use electrical tape, make sure to wrap each one of the 5 wires separately and it should work (Im assuming the head was completely ripped off and you have exposed wires). Its not that easy to short circuit a psu and burn it, they have protection against it, especially a corsair one.

check this out :http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/pc_builders_bible_2013
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
RealBeast

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Sep 13, 2010
17,109
473
104,790
You should not use the damaged SATA connector, remove it from the system and try to be firm but gentle with cables. Inspect the optical drive connector to insure that it too was not damaged, then use a different SATA connector to connect the optical drive. That entire SATA power cable would be compromised unless you properly reconnect the incoming and outgoing wires to power the other connectors on that string.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
W

Wowzoor

Honorable
Aug 15, 2013
19
0
10,510


I didn't use it again, it just messed up the whole PSU it seems.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
W

Wowzoor

Honorable
Aug 15, 2013
19
0
10,510


@Oczdude8, I didn't individually connect them at first. Someone on a different forum told me I needed to so I tried that. I am saying, maybe I short circuited it when I didn't do it individually?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
nukemaster

nukemaster

Titan
Nov 23, 2004
19,626
6
74,965
If you tied all the wires together, You could have shorted the power supply for sure.

Lucky for you, power supplies shut off or fold over when they get shorted.

Removing the tape and re-wrapping all the wires one at a time(you can tape them all together again after once they are covered.) should allow the power supply to work again. If not, you may have other issues.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
O

oczdude8

Distinguished
Oct 18, 2009
1,947
6
20,965


of course you will short circuit it, you connected the 12v line to ground. Your psu may be damaged. Have you corrected this issue? have you individually wrapped each cable with tape so there is no possibility of contact? try unplugging every cable from your motherboard and other peripherial and only connect psu to like a hard drive or fan and do the paperclip method to see if he psu powers on.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
W

Wowzoor

Honorable
Aug 15, 2013
19
0
10,510


The electrical tape I put on? I did do that, separated all the wires and didn't do anything.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
W

Wowzoor

Honorable
Aug 15, 2013
19
0
10,510


I individually taped them all and there is still the issue. I don't have a spare hard drive or fan so I really can't. :/

I could try and connect it to my GPU I have, if it won't break it.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
W

Wowzoor

Honorable
Aug 15, 2013
19
0
10,510


I couldn't be responding to you then.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890
Some PSUs cannot stay on without a minimum amount of loading on some of their rails. You would need a multimeter and check voltages on each rail before the PSU shuts down to determine whether or not any rail might be dead. With no loads attached, it is possible that one of the rails creeps up due to stray/leakage inductance and eventually trips over-voltage protections.

You could also see if adding a bit of load with fans and expendable old HDDs will take the PSU out of its possibly problematic no-load zone.

Shorting to ground should be fine since any remotely well designed PSU will at the very least have primary-side over-current protection that should prevent any damage to output components. If you shorted across supply rails (say +12V to +3.3V) then whether or not you might have messed something up depends on how those rails were built. I doubt the 3.3V rail contains components that would instantaneously fail after a short trip to 12V (assuming the PSU even gets a chance to ramp voltage that high before over-voltage protections start shorting rails to ground to protect their loads) but it isn't impossible.

Long story short: good PSUs are rugged devices. You shouldn't be able to kill them with a simple short.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890

Personally, when I accidentally short a PSU in my PCs, I simply make sure I fix the cause of the short, plug everything back in and boot it back up. The last time this happened to me was a loose molex connector bumping into a screw. I re-tied spare connectors away from the screw and turned the PC back on.

I would not recommend plugging the 12V AUX connector alone since the GPU may need power from the PCIe slot for proper power sequencing during boot. Your motherboard should have the second beefiest (and likely only other) all-rails over-voltage protection in your system after the PSU's own and that would make it the safest option after simulated loads.

Personally, I would not lose sleep about shorting a PSU unless it was a known-flaky unit. If any of your components got damaged, it would likely be from the short itself: some components react poorly to supply voltage dropping below output voltages when shorts occur on the input side - linear regulators in particular are notoriously vulnerable to that.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom