If the title seems familiar, it’s because there’s no visible difference (apart from the “brand name”) between the Enover timer that failed a little over a year ago and the Kuoke timer that recently failed:
That’s what it looked like after the repair. Prior to that, it’s just a blank display with no response to any inputs.
Given identical hardware, the overheated phenolic PCB under the Zener diode came as no surprise:
As promised, though, this time I epoxied a brass shim heatsink to the new diode in hopes of cooling it enough to live long and prosper:
I suppose I must now preemptively affix heatsinks in the two surviving timers, because we all know how their stories will end.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
6 responses to “Kukoke Outlet Timer: Over-powered Zener Diode”
Given the name of the company, and the country of origin, I have to ask… Is it UL Listed?
As the saying goes, the only reason that thing would have a UL certificate is the original owner didn’t notice it was missing …
Better than UL, i’m sure it’s marked CE: China Export.
Why, yes, it is:
So it must be good!
I dunno what a W.μ (watt-micron?) is, but 1800 sure sounds like a lot of them! Google assures me it’s 1.8 billion meter-kilograms per cubic second…
Claiming a hundred days from that little NiMH cell seems aspirational, too.