People may be aware that I've had a whinge in the past about my Inon z240s becoming unreliable over time, and dying on occasion for no apparent reason (at the time). The ready light would come on, the strobe would "fire" and little to no light would come out. The eventual diagnosed cause was overheating and I seemed to kill one on every tropical trip I took. Too many photos, too quickly, on full power in 30 degree water burns out the flash tubes.
I had the full internals of one replaced by the service centre in Australia which cost half as much as a new strobe. Since then I've tried to be more careful (moving to macro helped) but the tubes have still progressively been going brown and eventually failing. Recently I gave the one completely dead strobe I had to an engineering friend who took it apart, inspected the insides and ordered some generic flash tubes from the Internet. He put it all back together and after a pressure test I took it underwater. We weren't confident that the flash tubes would match in colour or power....but they did! The below shot has the fixed strobe mounted on one side mount tank and an untouched one on the other side.
So, if you find yourself with 6 inons but only 3 actually working at full power...that thing about having to replace the whole guts of the thing just to replace the tubes is not true. On the other hand, get someone who knows what they are doing to do it for you because the charge stored in the capacitor inside is enough to kill you, even after several months. And if you can't find anyone, I'd be most happy to buy your broken non-flooded strobes from you :-)
