So I work construction as an operator and I can be in a variety of different machines. Currently I’m filling in for someone running an interior elevator. Now here’s where the steam deck comes into play. I would play it (starfield) for however long until I got to about 10% battery and then I would plug it into the GFCI outlet in the elevator to charge with the supplied charger. Now my deck won’t turn back on. But the GFCI never tripped. Interesting right? GFCIs aren’t meant to look for fluctuations, they look for a connect to ground to shift to neutral right? So anyways fast forward to less than a month ago and after consulting with valve and after attempting everything I could possibly find online, they decided to go ahead with an RMA. Great, the new one shows up 2.5 weeks later and everything is fantastic. Then boom, this morning it fries again and it finally clicks in my head that it’s been getting dirty power. Has anyone else come across something like this? I mean being basically a computer I figured the deck would have had a little more protection than this. Thankfully I’m still under warranty so I should be able to get it replaced. Btw I’m not super nerd status but for those of you that are, I found a video of someone replacing a microchip related to the charge controller and that fixed the issue that I have. I can’t seem to find it so if someone else does feel free to share.
It’s an interesting hypothesis but hard to say whether your power source is the issue. Modern power supplies are supposed to pretty good at detecting voltage/amperage/hertz instability and utility power all comes from the same power plant which regulates itself pretty strictly. Could the temperature, air quality, vibration, etc be issues in your work environment?
There is always that possibility but highly unlikely. I’m currently working in a completed interior elevator in a special building with some of the most insane air filtration due to server floors. Whenever I’m not playing on it i keep it in the case so it shouldn’t be exposed to that much vibration. The reason why I’m leaning towards power is that my first deck lasted 8 months and i never had an issue until I came to this site. Then for maybe two weeks this replacement lasted and now it’s having the same problem. I asked the elevator installers if they have heard of anything like this and surprisingly they have so they are going to be testing it in the next few days.
I wonder if it could be electrostatics? I’m assuming this is a building with laminar airflow and that kind of shenanigans. Idk, could also just be bad luck. I do know the LCD decks had some cooling problems early on with the IC chips overheating and blowing out, but that should have been fixed with a software update.