Fast forward 5 months and imagine my silent sigh when you met your demise when I 'stressed' you up to 80% of your rated capacity. The obvious EE thing to do was to open you up. I was shocked by what I found:
An oscillator, potentiometer, and 1 Watt resistor run into each other and one of them says "who the fuck wrote this non-joke."
Slanted board is slanted. Heat sink is floating in the air, but is not floating from ground, yet it is eerily close to outer housing... UL would boil this alive.
Red heat shrink tubing isn't shrunk and doesn't completely cover exposed leads... not a big deal, unless you have an exposed low voltage line running nearby... oh, you do... um, well, fuck. Also, note that the heat sink on the left is slanted about 25 degrees (same picture, different view below).
It's like someone did a free transform on this picture in Photoshop... everything slants to the right.
Sigh
Hand soldered resistor... This is sometimes ok, but only if theres, you know, pads for each. note that the left side leads are almost touching the red capacitor leads. Creepage and clearance did not cross anybody's minds designing this gem.
Engineering: "We need thicker, 6 ounce copper traces or the board will melt"
Finance: "We can't afford 6 ounce copper traces"
E: "Then the board is going to melt"
F: "Think of something else"
Engineer's 3 year old son: "Solder bridge the important traces"
I did fix this inverter, but only because I already had the part that was broken and because I'm tired of buying new inverters... I derated the module to half its rated power.
