I just wanted to add that having experienced the same problem just two weeks ago, when I went to the Genius Bar and after they acknowledged the problem, I was offered a replacement which consisted in paying $169 for a refurbished unit !!! The broken unit was 27 months old !! I proceeded to call a supervisor and explained to him two things:
1) $169 is the cost of a refurbished unit from Apple straight out of Amazon.com. Since they had no replacements in the store and they would have to order it and ship it to me, what is the point of Apple's Tech support making me go to the store and spend a total of two hours just to offer me what I could have done from the comfort of my home?
2) It is the first time in my life a WiFi router fails on me. These products get replaced because they become obsolete in one way or another. Not because they die off.This is true for all brands. I admonished the manager about the sorry state of their brand perception on the street: Apple Products either die prematurely or they are killed prematurely by Apple itself. This appears to be its revenue re-generation model. Not good at all for the brand.
In the end, they offered me a new one for $50, offer which I shouldn't have accepted having been hustled and betrayed by my brand, but it was 9pm, I need to get back home and I didn't want to leave my home without WiFi while away on a business trip the they after for a week.
Finally, after years in the industry, it amazes me how someone gets away at the product design stage with sticking a fan to solve a poor heat dissipation design problem. Once you put any kind of fan in a product like this, its MTF accelerates tremendously. All because the design team didn't want to use more robust and conventional cooling techniques. It goes to prove: there are people who would rather loose the point rather than looking bad with the racket on the tennis court !!
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I'm keen to understand if you got this resolved. Mine is doing the same thing however my TC hard drive seems to have failed as I can't back up to it or read from it. The only error I have is that it may be overheating. Like yours, it feels warm but no warmer that I'd expect. I can't seem to clear the error at all. I decided to test it by putting it in a cool place for an afternoon thus ensuring that it was not warm before plugging it back in. Same error. Does this mean the drive has failed/jammed and is resulting in heat build up? I'd have thought there would have been a discreet error message for that.
Cheers
door Niall Carney
I ended up pulling the HD out and selling the Time Capsule itself for cheap. The HD still worked fine and I've been using it with an external USB dock for Time Machine backups. Cleaning the Time Capsule didn't work. I even left the case off and it ran fine for a few hours but started complaining about overheating again. Apparently it's a common problem. Sorry I couldn't find a better solution, and sorry that your HD appears to be fried.
door Matthew Bass
Could someone post where I could find disassembly instructions/guide? Pretty sure the fan on my Time Capsule is stuck. Thanks.
door Rico
The solution (for me) was to disassemble and lubricate the central spindle of the fan - as mentioned above. Works like a charm. But... it is NOT easy getting to the fan and the tiny clips that hold the fan housing together break VERY easily. With even one of them broken the fan housing leaks air down the seam making it less efficient and will cause the same over-heating problem all over again. IF you do break one, like I did, just use a tiny drop of super-glue, as small as you can get on the tip of a sewing needle and dab it where the broken clip is (was). You don't want to seal it for all time. If your micro-drop of super glue is small enough you should be able to crack it open again with an exacto-knive if you ever need to lube the fan again. But I'm not sure why you'd still be using this lousy paper-weight at that point. But it really does work. Blinking orange light is finally off (or broken).
door Jesse Morano
AirPort Extreme A1521 Teardown here's how to get to the fan. Go slow.
door Jesse Morano
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