thanks cabman!!
thanks chain, i need to get over and check out your girls.
well its day 52, venus and raven are looking great, they should be really happy with the lower temps due to the fact that i got my new power supply!!! the temp is down to a chilly 82 now, LoL. i raised venus up just a little to be at the same height under the lights as raven. i have my box all nice and neat now and everything is all good in the leaning u-haul grand wardrobe box.
now heres how i wired the new 12v computer power supply.
first i laid out everything i needed, see pics. the first thing you have to do is cut the green wire from the plug with 20 or 24 wires. this wire is the constant on power wire and the power supply will not work without doing this!! cut a black wire from the same harness and connect to the green wire, even if the unit has an external on/off switch you must do this for the unit to work!! you can now plug in the unit and the fan in the unit should start.now fine one of the flat 4 prong plugs and connect a 12v computer fan to it. the fan should start working. on most power units, there are 4 of these plugs, but some will just be a jumper from another. my guess is, if you hook up 2 fans to 2 of the plugs off the same line, each fan will only run at half speed due to splitting the single 12v wire.
on most units, the yellow wires are the 12v wires, red wires are only 5v but can still be used, your fans will just run at a slower speed due to less voltage. i think the orange wires are 3.5v. im not sure if you can use 2 colors like orange and red together to make 8.5 volts. now, there are other yellow wires with different plugs on the ends. i cut the extra flat 4 prong plugs off the doubled ones and connected them to the extra yellow wires. this gives me 5 total 12v single plugs, enough to run all my 12v fans.
i will take the fan out of the old power supply, clean it up and use it in my veg box. those 2 fans will run off 2 12v power adapters i had from an old printer and an old scanner. on these, as far as i know, the wire with the white stripe will be the positive wire and go to the red or yellow wire on the 12v fan. then black wire to black wire. 1 of the 2 fans in there broke a blade off and dam that thing made some noise, so in the garbage it went. i did notice when i took the cover off to get the fan out of the power supply that this was filled with dust. i mean full!! this is the thing that killed the unit i guess. i live in a house and we have had the ac on for months now and i just dont understand where all this dam dust comes from.
so any ways, there you have it, how to use a computer power supply for running 12v fans. now, i am not an electrician and this can be very dangerous as in getting shocked. so be very careful and make sure you tape up all connections and bare wires and you should have no problems. these units are great for this and there real cheap. this one was just 12.99 with shipping on ebay and it is brand new. hope this helps anyone who has been wanting use one of these but not sure how to make it work. heres the pics to follow.
