Here in the outback it sure can get hot, even in the middle of winter! My DG834Gv5 was running hotter than I liked, so I added some extra cooling. Nothing particularly elegant, just a fan, a resistor and a little bit of plastic surgery. What could possibly go wrong?

The problem seemed to involve my Apple AirPort Express and AirPlay. With the router opened up and some heatsinks attached, everything behaved itself. Put the case back on, however, and the AirPort Express would mysteriously disappear from the network. Clearly something wasn’t quite right!

My solution was to cut a hole in the top and install a 12 V fan I’d salvaged from another project. The fan was originally destined for a bit of Athlon cooling, but apparently this old Netgear needed it more. Running it at full speed was rather noisy, so I added a resistor to bring the voltage down to around 9 V. Much more civilised.

Making the hole was an adventure in itself. I drilled a collection of smaller holes around the outline and then used the drill to remove the remaining plastic before sanding the edges. The finished result wasn’t exactly factory quality, but it was reasonably tidy and the fan fitted where I wanted it.

I also discovered that measuring the mounting hardware beforehand might have been a useful idea. One of the bolts needed to be longer because there was a plastic support in the way, and I had to make sure none of the mounting hardware was going to interfere with the circuit board underneath. Naturally, I worked all of this out after I’d started.

I decided to have the fan blow fresh air into the case, directly over the heatsinks, rather than drawing air out. That’s the arrangement I preferred for this particular router, and it gave me a nice flow of air across the components before escaping through the rest of the enclosure.

The fan takes its power from the router’s 12 V input, so it runs whenever the modem is plugged in. That’s not much of an issue when the thing is normally running around the clock anyway. Once everything was back together, I had a much cooler-running modem without the little hurricane produced by the fan at full speed.

The extra cooling sorted out the temperature problem I was seeing with this particular router. At least the fan was earning its keep, even if this old Netgear was still giving me plenty of reasons to replace it.

Side note: I need a new modem!