$20 if you count the handful of 3amp fuses I popped trying to find the fault, the extra crispy lizard was apparently not the problem.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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that was literally the last 2 times. This time it was the secondary coil on the contactor, had a short. Well i guess it's technically always short since it's a continuous wire but it was even shorter. Was getting about 2 ohms across the coil and i guess 10-20 ohms is expected and the low resistance was popping the secondary fuse.
and a few weeks ago the compressor fan sounded like a t-rex stepped on a lego so i flipped her over, unfortunately she wasn't old enough for plugs so i just slowly let oil drip down my shaft and cranked it until i was satisfied. Now she doesn't scream at me when i try to turn her on. I use arch btw.
Recently fixed my home AC, pretty sure the contactor was screwed and the capacitor was done for. Just poor maintenance by the previous owner. Bought the parts, rewired the thermostat because it was a nightmare of cables in the furnace, and in the process blew a fuse and messed up the transformer in the furnace. I didn't have a replacement fuse so I jury rigged a bypass for now, got a new transformer that I tested and validated the output on, along with everything else in the chain, new contactor, new capacitor, and a completely rewired thermostat. Took a few days to fix.
In the process, I picked up an extra contactor, and capacitor, for the next time these parts inevitably fail. I need to go back and re-test all the parts, I suspect some may be ok, given that the wiring was such a mess, but I have no idea. I know the cap was definitely bad (bulged and leaking), but the rest might not be broken, they may have been malfunctioning by proxy of the bad fuse and wiring in the furnace.
Apart from fuses, I have everything and spares, so if I can validate that the transformer works, or the contactor is fine, then I'll have extra spares. No worries.
don't forget to get that fuse, any car parts store will have them.
Good thinking having spare parts on hand, mine always seems to fail on a saturday afternoon and everyone is closed. I'm just glad my town finally has an AC installer that lets you buy parts from their storefront right off the shelf. Most of the suppliers in town don't sell parts to us peasants for some reason, i guess they don't want money.
Well, they certainly don't want you buying parts and doing it yourself when you can pay 10x as much with their service fees to install a capacitor.
inductor things
glad you find the short, that one is even more tricky than a obviously busted capacitor
This guy ohms
it's the law
Does your magic words require a degree to understand and practice or my dumb ass can learn the magic of fixing ACs?
being an electrical engineer has its perks, but the couple youtube videos i watched didn't require any technical knowledge, mostly just safety knowledge, like the one hand rule and how to safety squint.
Yay ! Still some hope.
is figuring out this sort of stuff an exercise of trying to reverse engineer the product, or is it much simpler than I make it out to be? whenever I want to try and fix something all the videos I see people just magically know which places shouldn’t be shorting, and magically know which capacitor is causing it
It can be simple, you don't have to understand why something is wrong to know that it's wrong. They magically know it's the capacitor because it's the usual suspect, and they usually look swollen (the capacitor not necessarily the youtuber). Common problems are common, which is why youtube is pretty great because somene has probably had the same problem and posted the fix.