JP1 Remotes

Last night I was moving some of my electronic equipment around to rearrange things because I bought a new DVD recorder. When I came home from work today and went about finishing setting things back up, my VCR would not power on The only thing that I can think that I did that might be a problem is that I forgot to remove the tape that was in the VCR before powering it down. Do you think that might be why it won't power on now? I did open it up and I don't see or smell anything burned. And the fuse appears to be okay. It is a JVC HR-S7200U that I bought maybe 10 years ago. It probably isn't worth the cost of repairing, but I was wondering if there is anything I might try to fix it. Any comments would be appreciated. TIA

You'll have trouble replacing it because all the current VCRs are based on the $8 Chinese junk chassis.

The usual cause of this symptom is due to failure of all (at least deterioration of many) of the capacitors; probably in the power supply. Repair requires educated guessing on which ones to change, usually lots of them.

Short term solution is to plug in and unplug the A/C cord repeatedly until the power supply starts up and the microprocessor resets. If you can get it to turn on, it should keep working until it loses A/C power again.

I'll give that a try. Thanks Steve.

If you do want to try repairing it, when a capacitor burns out, there's usually some ugly gunk around the base of it. But, some capacitors may be dead without there being any gunk, so it's not a 100% sure fire thing.

If you open it up and you do see some caps with gunk on them, at least you know that that's your problem, but look for other burned out parts also.

This post may be too late for you, but I'll post this information to help others.

I agree that's it's probably a faulty electrolytic capacitor in the power supply. Here's two ways of finding the dead capacitor:

1/ The easiest way is to use an ESR meter. The great thing is that you can test the capacitors without having to remove them from the circuit board. I have fixed many dead VCRs using one of these meters.

2/ The hotter a capacitor, the shorter its life will be, so look for capacitors in the PSU that are mounted close to components mounted to heatsinks. Change them for new ones and see what happens

Be wary of using a capacitance meter, as this may not indicate that your cap is faulty - you're looking for capacitors with a high ESR, (equivalent series resistance)