Hi guys, i have a great F6 burning watts in my livingroom right now. I live in south Spain and in summer the amp got extremely hot after not even half an hour, (you could not touch it), so I got too afraid as to keep it working. I have my equipment in a diy rack and I decided to try something. I bought ultra silent pc fans and attached them under the shelf right above the F6, so they stand above the heatsinks and blow air softly over the heatsinks. You dont hear them at all and I attached a pot to decrease their speed when needed. F6 stays just warm. U can keep your hands on the heatsinks without problems at all.
The thing is I was expecting to hear of a solution as simple as that on the forums, but instead I read of a lot of people switching to other AB amps in hot months instead, so I started to wonder... Am I doing something I should not do?
The thing is I was expecting to hear of a solution as simple as that on the forums, but instead I read of a lot of people switching to other AB amps in hot months instead, so I started to wonder... Am I doing something I should not do?
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Not at all, many seem to have a fan phobia. You are making the heat sinks work better,
and the components last longer. Of course, if an amp were designed to require forced air
for proper operation, and the fan failed, the amp would shut down or fail.
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Yeah! That’s it!
HIFI 2000
It looks the same as the one from diyaudiostore.
I tell you, winter, autumn, spring is fine. Summer here is bloody mordor. No air conditioning in my house.
Appears to be the same size as "deluxe 4" from the store, so I can only surmise it is the ambient temp that is causing the heat. Fan in babysitter mode should work.
Russellc
The baby sitter of Zen's has been a solution for a number of years and fan cooling is a very good way to cool an amplifier that does not have enough heatsinking on it's own. If you do have proper heatsinking and it is running that hot I agree with SK8ter recheck your bias. With proper heatsinking you should be able to place you hand on the heatsinks for 5 seconds. NP common sense approach, 55C technical way.
If it only gets to say 65C in the summer I would not fret about it that much myself. Some diy'ers go even higher. Worse case is replacement of output mosfets. The temp of 65C is so hot you cannot touch it. You need to measure it with temp gun for an accurate measurement. Those mosfets are rated at like 150C so running at 65C is not that critical. May shorten the life of the mosfets some but the hotter they run the better the amp is going to sound. Vdi post is a good safety measure as well and 75C is what I would call excessively hot but I am sure some diy'ers run their amp that hot. What is the term, "fearless amplifier builders."
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I once had OTL tube amp from bruce rozenblit, very early one with six parallel tv tubes on the output, it only made about 2x1.6 watt, but boy it burned a lot of electricity and run so hot! There were resistors which run so hot they made blisters on the skin when you touched them, not to mention tubes and power transformer. Amp produced beautiful sound on lowthers, but burned like kilowatt electricity. I got rid of lowthers and the amp eventually. Now I am back to class A amps, I think I am running in circles.
Even in winter time I hate waiting for my amps to get up to temp where they sound their best. that is why I make them all like this:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/pass-labs/201281-burning-amp-ba-3b-balanced-57.html#post4794952
p.s. even on the vintage D150 tube amp I swapped the old nosy fans for the quiet Noctuas
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/pass-labs/201281-burning-amp-ba-3b-balanced-57.html#post4794952
p.s. even on the vintage D150 tube amp I swapped the old nosy fans for the quiet Noctuas
We've been having 110 degree days here in Texas and on those days I wont run the amps. I have a power conditioner in a different room (has a volt meter) and I literally watch my power grid sag from the heavy AC usage in my neighborhood. Don't want to mess w the potential brown out (the entire block dimmed) and extra heat from the amps. When winter rolls around though, ill be listening to tunes on the regular
No, you are not doing anything wrong at all.
I've been using two of these to cool down my 60W pure class A amp for ages. I run them at 10V DC, in parallel at all times - they are completely silent and do a great job. I have them placed just on top of the amp blowing air inside the amp through the perforated top metal cover - the heatsinks are placed at both sides of the amp. Like this, the fans are keeping capacitors and sensitive electronic parts inside the amp nice and cool, while at the same time they blow air over the top of the heatsinks (due to a reflected air-flow off the top metal cover), which keeps the whole shebang nice and cool.
Dynamic X2 GP-14
Fractal Design
One suggestion would be to rearrange things a bit so that the fans move air upward through the heatsinks. This will assist the airflow generated by natural convection rather than oppose it, and either provide more cooling at the same fan speed or the same cooling at a lower fan speed.
Like farting into a hurricane-- a fan has to be awful weak (or way turned-down) to not be able to totally overwhelm natural convection in a short "stack" (a 5-inch chassis; a hot 50 foot chimney does have strong convection).
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