Repairing LED Blinking 10 or 2 Times on TH-50PZ800U Panasonic Plasma Television

Recently, I experienced an issue with my Panasonic Plasma TV, model TH-50PZ800U, where it turned off and would not turn back on. All I would hear is a couple clicks and I wouldn’t hear the final sound after a pause. Instead, I would see the LED light on the lower left hand side of the front blink 2 times with a pause in between. After trying to hold the power button in to reset the TV, the LED would blink 10 times. Then, if I unplugged the power cord from the back of the TV, and waited for the LED light to stop blinking (likely from the capacitors), it would switch back to only blinking 2 times.

After reading about the issue online and watching some videos, it seemed like all signs pointed to troubleshooting logic boards and replacing them. This TV is nearly 10 years old at this point and this seemed like it could be a costly series of repairs. There was some talk about replacing a couple transistors to save some money. After a while, I stumbled across some talk about cleaning the fans on the back of the TV. I examined these fans and discovered they were quite dirty.

So, before even trying to attempt to repair logic boards, transistors and power supplies, I decided to try this fan cleaning option. Therefore, I took the TV off of the pedestal, laid it on the ground and removed the back panel by carefully removing the many small screws with arrows next to them. Next, I used a ShopVac and rubbing alcohol on q-tops to thoroughly clean each of the fans. Then, I put it back together and tried turning the TV back on. At first, the TV seemed to exhibit the same problems. Then, I remembered reading something about switching the cables in the HDMI ports due to one of the ports being different from the other two ports on the back panel. Perhaps it was just time and the capacitors discharging, but eventually this seemed to do the trick. Ultimately, I did switch the order of the cables back to where they were. It has been about two weeks now and everything seems to be back to normal. Hopefully, this continues working for me and helps anyone out there that still might have this TV and experiencing this problem.