Hi all. I’ve been happily using my 11th Gen Intel 13inch happily for the past few years. Unfortunately, I noticed my laptop has been extremely sluggish and hot today. I got a shocked as I opened up the cover and noticed the fan has melted, and the bottom of the keyboard shows sign of heat damage.
This was a little scary as I could imagine my laptop catching fire if I left it unattended. Has this issue happened before? And what will be the cheapest way for me the fix this problem?
Electronics enclosures are required to have fire retardants incorporated in. Does make it harder to start.
Hi @Proton1,
Nothing where the short occurred is combustible. Even if the processor heated up, it has a temp sensor that throttles it and as a last resort thermal cutoff that shuts the machine down. Even if you tried to restart it the same thing would happen and it would shut itself down if the system overheated. The fan is easily replaceable following the guide @MJ1 linked. 
If the keyboard is working fine; it is just cosmetic damage that will never be seen. Otherwise, a replacement keyboard can be ordered with the replacement fan. This is where the Framework design really shines; everything is repairable/replaceable and easy enough for almost every user to do themselves. 
Thank you all for the helpful replies. As suggested, I’ve just ordered the heatsink fan part.
Are there any underlying causes for this failure? It’s the first time I’ve experienced fan failure in all the laptops I’ve historically used.
Looks like the motor driver in the fan decided to go out in a blaze of glory.
Never seen that on a fan before, they usually just stop working.
I’d at least put some tape on the hole in the keyboard foil to prevent dust and stuff getting in there but if it still works with no Issues I’d keep using it.
Location wise it was likely the motor controller of the fan (pc fans are actually brushless ac fans so you need a controller for it to make it spin using dc), while I have never seen one fail open like that a motor controller can fail short and then basically heat up until something gives, in this case likely the red fan wire burning out/de-soldering itself here.
Did you ever blow that fan out with compressed air? over-spinning a pc fan can put quite a lot of stress on the motor controller which could have damaged it enough to cause that later on. Could also just be bad luck though.
The good news is you pan port is likely undamaged and there are likely no fuses blown (the state of red wire on the fan indicates it got power until it stopped by itself) so a replacement fan probably will just work.
Agreed, but in absence of that pretty much anything will be better than leaving it open
If a fuse blow, how hard would it be to replace the fuse?
If the heat sink is undamaged, is it possible to buy the cooling fan only? The fan itself appears to be disassemble from the heat sink
Since we normies don’t get access to the schematics so hard to tell. Definitely significantly harder than just plugging in a fan though. You’d have to find out where it is, measure it, source a replacement and solder it in. I have done that on a think-pad but I was able to source the schematic for that (well I didn’t replace it per se but it counts XD).
If something blew it also may not necessarily be the fuse but could also be something downstream from it.
Let’s hope it’s just the fan and it didn’t damage anything else. Since the laptop otherwise run the ec is probably not entirely destroyed but there is a non 0 chance that the fan signal pins are damaged. That would be extremely un-fun.
Edit:
@Proton1 Out of curiosity could we get a few more close up pictures of the fan hub from different angles? Even better if you could get rid off the rest of the label.
My 2cents:
In this computer the fan speed doesn’t have closed loop feedback, the temperature only controls the fan PWM duty cycle. The four wires of the fan are power source, PWM signal, RPM reading and ground. If I remember correctly, of you plug a fan directly to a power source (only connect power and ground) the fan will run full speed. If a signal wire broke, upon replacing the fan you either get full speed, or unable do get the RPM reading. A fan motor like this may or may not have a controller, a simplest BLDC fan only has a few hall effect sensors and transistors to use the spinning magnet to do the commutation instead of using brushes and the PWM signal comes form the computer.
Yes
For pc fans that is indeed specified, no pwm singal means fully on. Pwm low is a bit is a bit more inconsistent, some fans take that as off and other as some form of min.
Here however we got a lapop fan, those are a lot less standardized. I do agree though that in the case of a missing signal you’ll likely get off or full bore. However more likely than the signal being missing is it being shorted to ground which would almost certainly mean off. Missing rpm reading would be less bad. Usually there should be resistors on the pwm and tach lines so the ec is hopefully fine.
You are giving those controllers too little credit, they may only have very few pins but they do the entire thing themselves, the pwm signal from the computer is just the desired speed dial and is not involved in the actual driving of the motor. I have not seen a brushless dc fan (at least computing related) without a controller before. If I didn’t know any better I would have mistaken the controllers on some fans as just being a hall sensor.
I think that depends on make and models. On one of BLDC cooling fans(a 12V 1.6A desktop computer cooling fan) that I own I’m able to adjust the speed by adjusting the input voltage (signal pin disconnected) or PWM the input power(not signal). If the fan has a controller there’s a minimum working voltage for the controller, adjusting the input voltage might not work.
No you can pwm the controllers, we do that all the time on 3d printers, it’s barbaric but it totally works.
No thanks to inductance in the motor (and parasitic capacitance and other magic ac fuckery) the actual voltage at the controller doesn’t usually drop to 0 and even when it does those controllers start fast. Adjusting the input voltage also doesn’t work down to 0.
Seriously those things are nice little fully integrated, sensored, single phase ac motor drivers.
The fan is not available separately from Framework. I imagine there must be a way to get the fan off, but it seems it’s a bit involved. A member posted steps to open the fan casing to clean it (or replace the important half I guess) but didn’t see how to completely remove it.
Here are a few more photos. I peeled off the sticker as requested.
Is it fine leaving the keyboard hole unpatched? I’m worried about taping it up as if this happens again, the tape adhesive might melt and gunk up everything.
Thanks a lot for satisfying (at least some of) my curiosity.
I would reccomend against that. It is an open hole into something that looks like it’s supposed to stay inside. But if you use kapton/polyamide tape you don’t have to worry about it gunking stuff up in the unlikely case it happens again, that stuff wll start to break down long after all the other plastics in the keyboard are a liquid or worse XD.
Looking at the pictures I guess I blamed the controller prematurely, that thing is just sitting there unscathed (it may still be dead but it at least doesn’t look like it got anywhere near as hot as the bit where the cables are), maybe the bypass capacitor failed short? There are usually not that many other components on a fan other than the controller and it’s cap. The cirquitboard just failing short sounds unlikely.
@Charlie_6 looks like the controller on this puppy even is a 3-phase one
Does anyone have pictures of an un-burned fan without the sticker on it? I am wondering if there are any components near the wires.
Thanks for the great photos. Nothing wrong leaving the hole unpatched. It is sealed up in the laptop normally. If you have a little Xacto knife you could carefully cut away the damaged around the hole.
Maybe stick part of a popsicle stick in the hole as you cut so you don’t cut into the backside of the keyboard. If you had some really small scissors or even a pair of nail clippers you could do a little plastic surgery little by little to clean it up cosmetically.
Hope your replacement fan/heatsink arrives soon. Thanks for the update.
