MeanWell, Noisy Fan

[Kornbread]

Is there a simple solution for the always on noisy fan in a MeanWell smps? The smps is for a decent sized T-amp board, both will be mounted inside a chassis. I have a large but quiet 50cfm fan that should move enough air to keep everything in the chassis cool. Can I simply remove the top of the MeanWell, unhook the fan, and let the larger chassis fan keep it cool, or does the smps need air blowing directly on certain components?

[devnull]

They wouldn't have spent the money on a fan if it wasn't needed. That said, pull the specs for the fan and look for a quieter model.

[silverD]

What model?

[fpitas]

I know nothing about the MeanWell amp, but I slowed down my QSC RMX850's fan with a series 300 ohm resistor. Obviously it's no longer good for continuous high power such as DJ use, but I don't use it that way.

[a4eaudio]

1) do you have a thermometer where you could measure the temperature in the chassis very near the power supply with each fan?
2) does it have auto shutdown off it overheats? If so you could just run it hard with the quiet fan and see if it shuts down.

[Kornbread]

silverD Model # Mean Well se-600-48

fpitas Thought about using a resistor, and may go that route, but that thing is fairly noisy even as the fan's rpms rise. It would need to spin pretty slow to be quiet and as you stated, it probably wouldn't be good for its rated power anymore.

a4eaudio Have a temp gun we used to tune boy's nitro Revo, but it stb. Datasheet says the smps does have overtemp protection.

Since it has overtemp protection, it looks like I'll simply remove the top of the smps and allow the large chassis fan to move air across it's innards. Time to get some measurements on the smps/chip amp combo and get to cutting some wood for an amp chassis.

[Whitneyville1]

How 'bout checking Tiger Direct or other 'puter-thingey supply house for "hush fans"? "Frank"(enstein) beside me has 4 4" (88mm) "shark-fans" in him and you can't hear them. You can just barely hear the monster Thermolake CPU cooler when it hits "HIGH" but Frank's innards stay about 5*F above room temp. The "hush fans" cost double what cheap fans but they have better bearings and like 10X rated life. Worth a look.

[DeZZar]

I ripped the hair dryer straight out of my last mean-well power supply. Left the top cover off, put a large super quite PC fan on it and mounted it all in a box along with the amp it was powering - works perfectly and you cant hear a thing!

[fpitas]

It's true that fans tend to be standard sizes. There's a good chance you can find a super quiet fan meant for PCs etc.I got a bunch off Amazon, including two big ones to cool my J2. Class A amps are space heaters

[neildavis]

You might want to look at the data sheet for the Meanwell UHP series, which are fanless and about half the size of the comparable SE series devices. Meanwell shows a heatsinking solution of mounting the power supply to a large aluminum plate or chassis. I used the UHP-200 that way for an amp design, and it worked well. You can get aluminum plate cut to size at places like Online Metals and then build your custom chassis around that plate. I don't know whether the SE supplies would benefit as much as the UHP supplies from mounting to a plate, but it would certainly help...

[Kornbread]

That's a great idea neildavis I never thought of that. Unfortunately, unless another use for this MeanWell se600-48 can be found, it's hard to justify spending an additional ~$100 on a $50 chip amp. The se600-48 data sheet doesn't mention it can be mounted to a heatsink similar to the uhp series. I'll have to dig deeper on this.