Roger’s $0.02 - Heat and Electronics (Patreon)

Image from Gerlat

This summer has broken heat records across the globe with parts of the southern hemisphere experiencing temperatures around 40C, which is bonkers when you realize this time of year is their winter. It’s hot with the south and west-facing side of my house getting very hot. In my living room where the vaulted ceiling offers no space for insulation, it can bake. But beyond the physical discomfort of the heat, high temperatures wreak havoc on electronics. Making sure they don’t overheat is crucial to ensure their normal operation. It’s something I have taken great care to be mindful of this year.

One of the biggest victims of heat are LED bulbs. Unlike traditional incandescent and fluorescent lights, LED bulbs require a simple IC to function. This is often built into the base of the building inside the housing. I had two LED bulbs fail on me the previous year lasting only 13 months. Their lives were cut short by a week-long heat wave that persisted into the night. Outside of the cost of replacing the bulbs the hassle of actually replacing them and their inconvenient locations pushed me to replace several of them with CFLs. On paper, CFLs have fewer luminance hours than a comparable LED bulb, but in my experience, they do better with the hot weather Southern California regularly experiences.

The next heat problem is my PC. While old, most of its components have proven surprisingly resilient to the higher temperatures. The same cannot be said of its PSU (power supply unit). I have had to replace it twice in the span of six years. I will state that I did not cheap out on the PSU. I picked up a Seasonic modular 850 Watt model with solid online hardware and buyer reviews. I first noticed them when I began experiencing erratic system behavior like system lockups, random reboots, and POST error messages. After replacing the unit for a second time I noticed that I had left the switch for my PSU “hybrid mode” on. BIG Mistake. Hybrid mode reduces the PSU's fan noise by automatically turning on and off the fan depending on the temperature. I later learned it should only be used in very particular use cases. With my new unit, I keep it switched to “normal mode” where the fan runs constantly. I also replaced a few of the PCIe modular power cables after noticing some of them had worked themselves loose  due to constant expansion and contraction caused by heat and cooling. Finally, every few months during the spring and summer I make sure open my PC and unplug and reseat the power cables to the motherboard and CPU.

Of course, my laptop is just susceptible to the heat as my PC is but the problem manifests itself in a dramatic slowdown in performance. In a bid to manage the heat on my 2019 16” MacBook Pro, MacOS reduces CPU and GPU clock speeds. Things like Premiere Pro, After Effects, websites, and even TextEdit take forever to do simple things like save, page refresh, or playback unaltered video. My solution has been to place my laptop on an aftermarket laptop/monitor stand from Amazon, and then point my room fan in its general direction at low speed. I’ve been surprised at how well this works. The fan manages to move the ambient air around the laptop chassis ensuring it's actually cooling instead of baking.

Finally my Xbox One. Although I use it very little since I got my Nvidia Shield I do remember playing Rise of the Tomb Raider one recent summer on it. Because it's located in my living room it gets pretty toasty in the summer. After one boss battle the system abruptly turned itself off. I put my hand on the machine and it was hot. It was so hot to the touch I flinched when I initially put my hands on it. The system saved itself by turning it off. It kept the machine workable but it killed an hour of gameplay progress.

The main lesson I learned; maintain a cool surrounding for your gear. Of course, it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. For example, I don’t use my AC during the middle of a show so I don’t experience power spikes when it and a dozen other homes with ACs on my block kick in causing a brownout which could force my PC to reboot. Even though I use a UPS the potential of risk an outage during a show is too great for me to leave my AC on. Instead, my tactic is to pre-cool the house in the early morning when the outside is cool and power draws low. This creates a cool buffer and allows me to make it until 3 pm Pacific before I need to turn on my central or portable AC. I also confine my video and audio editing to the evenings where a few open windows and a room fan can keep things cool. Even little things like keeping my PC's vents clear can do a lot. With climate change and heat waves, a regular occurrence having a plan in place to keep the equipment my livelihood depends on functioning is a must.