Hacker News Reader

Comment by petecooper | Hacker News Reader

>And let's not speak of the chronically overheating stuff.

Some-time wireless installer here, I bring a snippet of anecdata.

A recent client had the full Unifi experience for an outdoor network, including 3x EdgeSwitch XP (formerly known as ToughSwitch) in a single IP65-rated, largely airtight enclosure.

The network would go offline on summer afternoons. It was overheating, those models run hot and are not recommended for low ventilation areas, but they weren't convinced.

I fitted a thermometer, went back three days later and checked the logs. The temperature peaked at 143 Celsius.

View on HN

143 Celsius??? That's 289.4 Fahrenheit, which I find difficult to believe. Not impossible... just difficult. That's quite impressive.

The heat problems are real. I mounted one to the underside of a cabinet, and it melted the plastic lining on the opposite side of the wood. They run extremely hot.

If memory serves the ER-L idles at around 40C exterior temp. That was the primary reason I went with the ER-X despite hooking it up to a gigabit uplink.

In fact if it was actually reaching 143 C, I'd say that ironically I'm more positively impressed by the fact the hardware works at all at that temperature than I am negatively surprised by the fact that its thermal controls are that bad.

For completeness, that was when the summer sun was shining directly on the enclosure in the hottest part of the day, during a country-wide hot spell. Still, no airflow, heat generation, etc.

Every day, cut out. When it cooled down, it worked again. This continued for about two months, then they failed.

Sure that's kind of a worst case scenario there. One of the bigger problems with the ER-L design, IMO, is that they don't have any sort of temperature measuring device inside the case itself. They run hot even without extreme ambient temperatures so you'd think there'd be some baked in way to monitor the temperatures, but no.

> The temperature peaked at 143 Celsius

Most electronic devices say operate between x and y degrees and if in full sunlight the temp may have exceeded y, which in a device that generates heat itself led to runaway overheating?

Either way plastic could melt at that temp and you'd definitely burn your hands touching it. Pretty crazy.

The housing of the switch is metal with rubberised feet and bumpers. Thankfully I wasn't handling it when it was offline (and hottest), but the rubber was completely destroyed after the fact

I assume the soldered innards failed, though I never did open it up to check properly.

Outdoor network + airtight enclosure + summer + full sun ... 289 degrees doesn't surprise me.

This sounds like unrealistic expectations and a poorly designed implementation.

Hey, just a little ysk: it's anecdote / anecdota from the greek word meaning "unpublished", nothing to do with data! :)

"Anecdata" is usually online shorthand these days for saying, "I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but fwiw here's my experience."

^ This is what I meant by it. Not corroborated by any scientific study, just a field report.

> Not corroborated by any scientific study, just a field report.

But that's exactly what "anecdote" means already, why change it?

It’s a joke, derived from the saying “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com