microwave oven - beeper too loud

Tape some squeezably soft Charmin toilet tissue over the hole in the peizo buzzer.

Actually, just find the peizo buzzer. If it is not one that has the adjustable top on it to close off the hole, get some sticky back loose rubber foam and stick it over the hole. DO NOT completely block off the outlet to the buzzer as it will over time damage the peizo element.

Huh?

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Same for me! Frank@TeleTronic Services[UK]

Huh? What?

That's extremely unlikely to damage anything - unless you touch the HV capacitor.

N

Actually, a peizo buzzer can be damaged if the hole for the sound is completely blocked off. Over time the peizo element will crack from the excessive resonance inside the peizo housing and simply stop working. I have seen this personally too many times when nurses will completely tape over the alarm ports on piezo buzzers instead of using the volume control properly.

How will it damage it? I've been sticking a piece of scotch tape over the piezo speaker in PC's to make it quieter for at least a decade, never had one fail in any way and it makes it much quieter.

Completely blocking off the output messes up the resonance of the housing, this can cause excessive vibration of the piezo element and it can crack. Obviously scotch tape still vibrates and passes the sound out, it is not a complete block of the sound outlet.

We have even received a service bulletin from one particular medical device manufacture due to the high failure of the peizo buzzers and the cause being the nurses putting the thick tape over the buzzer hold because it was too loud for them, completely blocking off the hole. Not to mention the fact that the nurse was in effect tampering with a patient safety alarm in the first place, what they did would eventually completely disable the alarm putting the patient at even greater risk.

Damn those annoying heart rate monitors!

N

I'd believe that, peizo is a type of crystal after all which would be rather brittle. I'd imagine like microwaves, medical gear would have a high frequency tone unlike a PC speaker which is usually a bit lower, and certainly not a constant tone, unless you have a really old PC and play 4 colour DOS based games on it :)

JD

}Actually, a peizo buzzer can be damaged if the hole for the sound is }completely blocked off. Over time the peizo element will crack from }the excessive resonance inside the peizo housing and simply stop }working.

Boy, you learn something new every day. Perhaps the makers of these heart monitors should make it easier to adjust the sound...perhaps add the ability to download "ring-tones"...("Another One Bites the Dust", by Queen)

Stan.

What piezo speaker inside a PC?

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On 24 Jul 2005 18:54:49 -0400, Sam Goldwasser put finger to keyboard and composed:

After a couple of minutes with Google:

- Franc Zabkar

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Please remove one 's' from my address when replying by email.

Not entirely implausible -- I've encountered a couple of machines with piezo transducers on the motherboard instead of the regular little speaker that most machines have. One of them had a speaker as well for no obvious reason, and I was most annoyed to find that removing the speaker didn't stop it beeping on power-up...

I've also seen a Promise RAID controller (an SX-6000, I think?) that had a piezo beeper on the PCI card. Since it beeped every couple of seconds whenever it was checking or rebuilding the array (which could take several hours), it fairly quickly got a blob of Blu-Tak wedged over it to make it a bit quieter.

--
Adam Sampson

the

had

90% of the motherboards I've come across in the last decade have a piezo speaker soldered to them rather than needing to plug in that paper cone speaker on the case. It's only used for beep codes these days anyway.

I suppose that since the PC "speaker" has little function in most systems, going to a piezo beeper would be a reasonable cost savings.

And I do suppose you will be really upset if as some others have said, the thing might be damaged. :)

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