5/07/2012

Amber Wrench Light on a Sonicwall TZ-180

I have had several older Sonicwall TZ-180's were the wrench or amber error light comes on/blinks or the Sonicwall suddenly has strange errors. Since these were out of warranty I figured I would open them up. Here is what I found.
As you can see the 2 - 470uf 16v capacitors are swollen. I replaced them with 2 - 470uf 25v capacitors I got from www.badcaps.net. The voltage does not matter as long as it is the same or higher than the old ones. Do not use Capacitors from Radio Shack.

The capacitors cost .67 ea. The repair took 15 minutes. You will need a decent soldering station and a lighted magnifying glass to do the job. See cap removal page on badcaps site on how to replace them. Replace both caps even if one is not swollen. The third green and copper cap can stay if it is not swollen.

I recommend doing a boot to firmware with factory defaults from the settings section. This will clear the memory of any corruption due to the bad caps. You may have to do a boot to safe mode the first time if the Sonicwall was not accessible before the repair. Unplug power hold the reset button down plug in power and continue to hold the button for 30 seconds (no less). Then manually configure your IP to 192.168.168.xxx where xxx is any number except 168. You can then access the Sonicwall on 192.168.168.168. Then do the factory reset.

6 comments:

RaVeNMaDDoX said...

Thank you for this! I had a TZ 180 and it was giving me fits about installing new firmware. Sometimes it would take it, sometimes not, but it never successfully rebooted. I opened the case to discover the same swollen caps, replaced them as instructed, and now the SonicWall works perfectly! Thanks again

Unknown said...

Can a TZ 180 be taken apart without messing up the metal case?

Flinx said...

I have never messed up the case taking one apart.

Anonymous said...

Is it a 6,8,10 MM size?

Flinx said...

if you are asking about what size is the capacitor, any capacitor that will fit will work, I do not have measurements.

Anonymous said...

I just replaced these same 2 capacitors on my old TZ180 and it works again! It died last week but has been resurrected. I had a hell of a time removing the dead caps. I couldn’t manage to unsolder. I hacked around it but wow was that annoying. Your post was perfect, thanks.