Electronics help please!

[Clugnut]

Does anyone have any experience here with working on the guts in electronics? Here is what I did:

At work Monday, I unknowingly plugged my Makita battery charger into a 220v outlet. What resulted was a pop and a little puff of smoke. I cracked it open, and right after where the power comes into the board was what looked like a capacitor, all black and cracked down the middle. A little digging revealed this is a MOV (metal oxide varistor), or the sacrificial lamb when dipshits plug stuff in incorrect outlets.

My questions are: Where can I get a tvr-10241 MOV?, and, Do you think that this part saved the charger, or am I wasting my time? Thanks for your advice.

[MGP]

Now we're dancing in my ballroom -- I design and work with this stuff everyday. I just pulled the datasheet for this particular varistor and it will be easy to find a replacement for.

One thing you should check is whether any of the connecting PCB tracework was damaged/blown up when the part blew. There are some pretty massive surge currents when those parts let go... also they sometimes use a PCB trace as a fusible link so even if you replace the MOV it may not work.
There may also be a fuse (or fusible resistor) in series with the part, if so it's possibly blown as well.

Can you post some pics of the damaged area of the PCB? I can probably tell you by seeing those whether it's worth trying to save or not.

[Clugnut]

Thanks for the help, MGP. I just bought this kit two months ago. Burns me up.

All the tracework looks really good. I removed the MOV already, and it really seems like it stopped there. There is black around the area, but it wipes off. There are two fuse on the motherboard, and both look OK. Here are two pics, front and back.

[MGP]

Excellent. I don't know if you have a mulitimeter or not but if you do you should check to make sure the fuses are OK (if you haven't already).

The most common cross reference for this part is a V150LA10A or V150LA10AP. It's an exact match so pretty much guaranteed to work. I'm not sure the best way for you to buy one but this online source doesn't have a minimum order and their pricing is good (I use them all the time for small quantities of parts). I'm pretty sure they have USPS as a (cheap) shipping option.

V150LA10A

Radioshack has a part that's close but not exact. I'd get the right part if at all possible. Solder that new MOV in and you should be good to go.

[Clugnut]

Awesome MGP! Thanks for the link and help. $.31 + shipping is a lot better than buying a new charger. I'll give it a try. Thanks again!!