The Fanshim fan has Known lubrication problems. if pimoroni won’t replace it it may be worth trying to oil it before buying another.
Hi everyone,
seems this item is really effective to contrast the heat, is well engineered but it’s poorly built, unfortunately.
I contacted the Pimoroni team and they offered to replace it. As I’m living abroad, a refund was a more logic and less expensive solution, so they gave me back my money.
+1 to the service, -1 to the fan-shim.
I would suggest to find a different solution to keep the RPI cool.
Personally I went for a different case (one that has a good ventilation design), a BIG heatsink and a Noctua fan, 40x10 mm on top of it.
They have a Hat in the works, prototype stage, that looks to have a much better quality fan on it. Might even be a slightly bigger fan. There is a picture of it on their Twitter account. Link at top of page to that account. If anybody is interested in a look see.
My fan shim is working fine, its not on 24/7 though. A couple of hours a day maybe. My fan does run continuous when its on though. I set it up that way. Just my personal preference, I didn’t see the point of on, off, on, off…
I think you may have just caught a duff one? The forum is bound to have more users with problems than people praising it, so it may seem like they have design problems. My fanshim has been great, although quite new it has worked without issue, once I could use it with LibreElec, it is still very quiet, it is on 24/7 but it is used sparingly , with software infrequently setting temperature thresholds on and off. So I can’t speculate as to the fans lifespan running continuously.
@NotAfan: well, it could be, yes. My comments are based on my experience and the few ones (compared to the whole amount of sold items) of the people that I may read on the forum that, being a “problem handling environment”, obviously have a massive number of evident issues.
It’s interesting to notice, anyway, that these issues are all related to the fan being noisy. This could indicate a weak spot to work on for improving the quality of the device, IMMO.
Yeah, you will get negative feedback more often than not on a tech forum. Its where you go when you have issues. The positive comments are usually in the reviews on the product page.
It could be that they got a bad batch of fans from the supplier? Made on a Friday or Monday maybe? Those in production will get that. ;)