I like the Latin reference, and am grateful for the translation. It's true that most of us tend to attribute coincidences to cause. I've had 3 LNBs go bad over the years. One LNB went bad after a week of > 100 deg temperatures when I lived down in Md, so I blamed that on the temperature. I had another LNB go bad seemingly unrelated to anything I could think of other than being an unreliable brand (Eagle/Aspen) although I now see that these are getting more popular. My third LNB to go bad happened in the dead of winter when the temps got down around 10-15 deg, although this LNB would get better when the temps got even lower, sub zero, and was OK again when it got warmer. It was only bad when in the 10-15 deg range. So anyway, I've had high temperature failures, low temperature failures, and unrelated failures. I've never had a failure associated with a solar outage period, but I'm sure eventually I will. The only failure that was certainly temperature related was the 10-15 deg thing, because it was very repeatable. Happened every day when the temp got into that range.
Generally from a chemical process standpoint, I think that keeping an LNB warm is a good thing, because if the LNB is warmer than the outside air, then the relative humidity inside the LNB will be low, and you're less likely to get condensation. Ie in high humidity areas, I think condensation is more of an issue than temperature. I think this is one of the problems with using these 4x1 DiseqC switches, because you aren't running any power through 3 of the 4 LNBs connected, so they are allowed to cool down to ambient temperature, and they can easily experience condensation inside the feed at least, and possibly inside the LNB itself, when the relative humidities go up at night. If you keep an LNB powered up, it's pretty unlikely that you'll ever get moisture condense inside your feed.
I've heard of people who have cooked the entrance of the feed, but I'm still a little skeptical about cooking the actual LNB itself. It's certainly possible if you have a highly reflective dish, like a wet solid surface dish, but since the solar outages aren't at the hottest time of the year, and since the outages only last about 10 minutes, and since the actual electronics aren't at the focal point, while melting the plastic caps is likely, I wonder how hot the actual LNB electronics would get.
This gets into another issue, at least for BUD owners, ie the question of whether to use the big black plastic feed covers. Since I was for a while convinced that the 100 deg temps killed one of my LNBs, I often take the covers off during the summer time, and put them on it the winter. This also had the advantage or reducing the chance of getting stung by wasps that tend to build nests inside those covers. But I often wonder whether an lnb exposed to direct sunlight would get hotter than an lnb inside a black cover. Most LNBs are a light color that would reflect at least the visible part of the spectrum, but you never know about the IR part which is more related to the heat.
Before I retired, I used to work in a lab where we tested military electronics in all sorts of environments, from -40 to +140, in all sorts of humidities, and sun loading and other severe conditions. While not many devices were able to function through the extremes, most came back to life after you got back to ambient conditions. we seldom saw electronics actually "killed" by the temperature extremes.
Bottom line is, related to the Latin phrase above, I think we all have a lot of opinions about things like this that are probably all based on coincidences.
