Merry endoscopy to you, Santa

My neighbors all have sweet and modest x-mas decorations. I brought home 2.5 meter of Santa from a Texas Wallmart to prove that bigger is better. Some kids don’t cry when they see him.

Santa has sandbags for feet to maintain a positive and caring pose, tethering straps to hold his hands through rough times, and a noisy fan constantly inflating his leaky body parts.

The fan is sits where endoscopy starts, and after three warm and wet seasons in Houston, it gave up on me. 15 days before x-mas. All the kids in the neighborhood rely on me bringing santa back to life. All their best behavior through the year goes down the drain if Santa won’t show up.

With all the respect in the universe, I give mr Santa’s behind a little pinch with my pliers, and his rear opens up for me so I can retrieve the fan. No complaining, he’s a brave fellow.

The back side of the fan reveals the cause of the funny smell I have experienced passing by mr. Clause lately. The sticker is melted, and the plastic underneath shows that the chinese manufactured fan could do three seasons, but not four. Or maybe the second seafaring voyage for it was one too many.

12V, 1.5Amps, that’s a rather decent consumption for a small fan like this. My wild guess is that low cost was on the priority list for the man in red was designed, and a low efficiency fan with plastic bearings is probably cheaper than a more efficient fan with lower energy consumption.

But hang on, the label actually reads brushless fan. In my experience, brushed motors are always cheaper than the brushless ones. Could this be a fake label?

I pry open the lid of the fan to get a better view of Santas “where the sun never shines”.

I’m not able to split the motor from the casing, but I can get a glimpse of electromagnetic coils on the outside of the rotating hub of the fan. It is brushless.

On a conventional brushed motor, the permanent magnets are static, mounted to the chassis of the motor. And the dynamic centre of the brushed motor holds electromagnets with brushes that switch the current direction based on the rotation of the shaft, and hence create the rotational force.

On a brushless motor, the permanent magnets are mounted on the rotating hub, and electromagnets are static. To make this work, computer power is needed to change the current direction with the rotation. This has a higher initial cost than brushed motors, but has many operational benefits, like reduced energy consumption and less electrical noise.

I don’t understand why they placed a brushless fan in the exhaust of mr coke and presents, but hey, what’s a hero without his secrets?

So to the big test, can I fix this and get big guy back on his feet before the kids go medieval on presents-and-sugar-overload-day?

The fan just stalled out when I applied 12V to it, so I went online to look for a replacement fan. With 11 cm diameter, it’s comparable in size with the fans sitting in desktop computer cabinets. I have a fan from a laptop I tore down to reuse the screen, but it runs on 5V and is only 4-5 cm in diameter. Maybe it can inflate parts of Santa, but I don’t think it will bring him back to his youth.

So I ordered a 12V fan for computer desktop cabinets, it will arrive in a few days. It only consumes 0.05A, according to datasheets, but is loaded with oil bearings and whatnots. I hope it is comparable in moving air to the 1.5A original, time will show.

Probably I’ll just tape it in place and hope it keeps Santa on his feet until christmas day, but please share your best experience on mounting replacement fans in inflatable santas.

Follow me save the neighborhood from x-mas despair when spareparts for Santa arrives.