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Prices of components gone silly...

cj66

pfm Member
One of our air-con units decided to take the day off, completely lifeless.

I tracked the problem down to a burn out on the control board. Immediate parts for replacement included;
1x 450v tank cap
1x main diode
1x 7leg to220 power switcher
1.5uf 450v poly cap
A few more diodes, a couple of resistors and another cap. None of which I had or equivalents thereof.

By that point the price of the components had topped £25 according to Element14.
Out of curiosity I searched for the entire board, £27.50 genuine original!!!
I'll be putting the soldering iron away.
 
Prices have gone up a lot recently plus all the major component distributors have been doubling down by finding more ways of leveraging profits and all due to brexit (plus a bit of covid maybe....).
Some are making the min order without getting charged a ridiculous handling charge as much as £25+ where there was no min order or handling charge until recently and some are approaching it from another direction and setting min quantities so if you want a component you are forced to but 10 or more of them.
To compound all this there is a egregious shortage of all parts it seems! If we were talking groceries here than I'm talking about even things as generic and common as a loaf of bread is hard to find! Things like 100uF 16V electrolytics and 1K 3W resistors have been awkward to get hold of at all recently! Such parts are so generic that most companies will show you say 20 choices from different brands etc if you search for a 100uF 16V cap but lately I've been finding say 18 of the 20 come back as "Out of Stock" when you actually click on them to buy them!
 
I am no Brexit apologist, and it has undoubtedly added to problems, but the issues here are more complex: covid causing rolling shutdowns of major factories of anything and everything; covid causing transportation issues with road, rail, air and shipping all effected; that stupid ship stuck in suez; automotive industry shutting down to protect profits and killing bits of their supply chain dead, then expecting to just pick it all up again JIT when it suited them seriously straining anybody that was already struggling and had exposure to automotive (just about everybody in electronics); IC "manufacturers" moving over decades to outsourcing to more or less just TSMC who are then swamped; shortage of fab space pushing only the "current" feature size ICs to be worth running pushing production of older larger feature size devices to the back of the queue. All this raised prices anyway, then in swooped the money making gits that buy up the last remaining stocks to jack the price higher as the greedy feast on others problems.

I have a number of examples where this has directly effected me this last year, with older microcontrollers going for ten times more than they should, but offers of a hundred times more are out there if you are in real need. I have spent Q4 2020 and all of 2021 designing out devices that are not obsolete just impossible to get hold of at sane prices: codecs, ADCs, BT devices dependent on old uC, LCD displays, DSPs, ugh ...

I keep being told 2022 will be better, I don't see it yet, I am hoping for some normality in 2023 to be honest.

I feel your pain, and have scars of my own to show and tell when all this is done.
 
The system was creaking before CoVid, I work for a big company who were used to getting their own way on components and the sourcers were being told that due to the massive demand from the car industry the suppliers were rationalising their product chains and no it’s not up for debate, this is what you can have. CoVid has just made things a whole lot worse obviously, god help anyone in a small company their names are not even going to go into the hat when it comes to supplies.
 
Good Afternoon All,

It's been a few years since I was routinely buying parts but my looking into populating Avondale PCB's has shown that the market has definitely changed. RS have certainly moved some of their product lines to minimum order levels of 100 or 200 and yes there are some eye watering lead times.

Why have Farnell stopped supplying the MFR5 680R resistor yet still stock lots of other values in that range, one assumes volume levels???

Parts are still out there but it is a pain having to source from RS/ Farnell/ Mouser/ Digital-Key/ Cricklewood etc. and avoid shipping costs............

Regards

Richard
 
Ironically I have had to watch Digikey take delivery of parts we have been unable to secure thorough direct discussions with manufacturers and their preferred local supplier ... i assume they must have got some decent contracts in place. Yes I work for an SME, but how big do you have to get? Well I have learned a few million US$ pa with one manufacturer is enough to get some help and a quarter of a million US$ pa with another is not. Be grateful for what you can scrape together right now as a diyer!
 
Good Afternoon All,

It's been a few years since I was routinely buying parts but my looking into populating Avondale PCB's has shown that the market has definitely changed. RS have certainly moved some of their product lines to minimum order levels of 100 or 200 and yes there are some eye watering lead times.

Why have Farnell stopped supplying the MFR5 680R resistor yet still stock lots of other values in that range, one assumes volume levels???

Parts are still out there but it is a pain having to source from RS/ Farnell/ Mouser/ Digital-Key/ Cricklewood etc. and avoid shipping costs............

Regards

Richard

There's always been a few very odd stocking decisions made by some of those companies... Power transistors intended as complementary pairs for audio amps and which the distributor has only ever stocked the NPN one etc!
 
Indeed, I was recently looking for 3 pin Molex housings - May 2022.

FFS.

I placed an order with Mouser for this chip back in August. Back in stock date is now Jun 2022 :(.

Being an Onsemi part I ordered 10 from their website. They arrived in 10 days. Looks like Mouser isn't at the top of Onsemi's supplier priority list.
 
It was the amount of out of stock stuff I noticed when rebuilding both the Leak TL12 Plus and the Pass Aleph recently. I have no idea how much this stuff usually costs so I don’t have a reference there, but what was obvious was my choices were limited with some stuff I may have chosen with a restock date 6-12 months away.

PS One of my problems is I don’t trust eBay for electrolytic caps as Chinese fakes are well known to exist, and Farnell have a £10 delivery/handling fee under £40. I ended up buying myself a Peak ESR meter for £90 when buying a fiver’s worth of caps last week as I was too much of a tight-arse to pay the tenner! I’ve done similar before too e.g. bought a huge reel of solder or something I know will be useful eventually just to get the free shipping!
 
Just to add insuit to injury, the components had a 7 to 10 day delivery time.
The complete board arrived today, 3 days, it's installed and the air-con unit is happy again.
 
For 20 years or more the handling charges have come and gone with RS and Farnell and I'd move most of my business to whichever had no handling charge at the time. At present the charge is not levied at business customers with RS but they have vastly increased min orders by packing things in bags of 10 or 20 or even 100 when they were available individually until recently. farnell will still sell you 1 component but the handling charge will often be 100 x the cost of the part. Components valued > £5 ish each may still be available individually from RS in some ranges so it very much can be worthwhile comparing them!

Basically, like, it seems, all businesses, instead of being grateful to still be trading after covid they are clawing customers eyes out trying to make up for lost sales. Outrageous IMHO.
 
^^ Yes, haven't use them for a while but in the past they were always good. Lot of surplus stuff that was always decent quality.
 


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