I should have just gone ahead and purchased a Tivo Premiere brand new but for some reason I thought it was worth saving $20 by purchasing a refurbished unit. It arrived with a slight crack in the front face plate and a fan that sounded like it was on its way out. Rather than pay to have it boxed up and shipped back or wait however long it would take get it fixed, I decided to just go ahead and replace the fan myself.

I scanned through a few posts regarding this subject and found one Premiere owner who replaced the original fan with an Evercool EC5015M12CA. I decided to go ahead and order one.

New Fan (Evercool EC5015M12CA)

When it first arrived and I opened the Tivo I initially thought that I had ordered the wrong fan. The old one had two pins but the new one had three pins. I later went back to re-read some posts and realized I had missed a comment stating that you could ignore the “sense” pin and just connect the red and black wires (note that they must be connected exactly as the old ones were).

To open the Tivo Premiere and replace the fan you’ll need a Torx bit. I have a set of Stanley Torx and used the “T-10×4”.

Original Fan Connector (left, unplugged) and New Fan Connector (right)

New Fan Installed & Connected

The new fan has been working great. It’s much quieter than the old one, though much of the noise from the previous fan may have been caused by some kind of fault. So far, temperature ranges have been normal.