Death and Resurrection of Asus RT-N16

One day the faithful Asus RT-N16 suddenly died.
Power supply was swapped yet there were no lights.

Post-mortem examination revealed a swollen capacitor (16V 680uF).

Bad 16V 680uF C110 cap

Due to double sides board with lots of vias, and crappy RoHS solder, de-soldering required hot air gun.

C110 gone.

I didn’t have 16V 680uF capacitor handy, so I improvised with a very tall 25V 1000uF capacitor. Again, solder would not take with soldering iron, only with hot air gun.

New C110. Improvised with placement as it was too tall .

I have checked the rest of the caps (on board) and they were all within the spec.

The router came alive after C110 replacement.

It’s alive!

Measuring the bad cap resulted in ~92uF…

680uF? Not even close.