Kung Fu Maintenance takes you along as he troubleshoots an air conditioner that tripped the breaker and blew the fuses. This video shows further isolating of the AC components in order to diagnose where a wiring short is coming from.
We got an AC not cooling. I’m going to pop it apart and take a look at what we’ve got going on. The breaker was tripped inside, so I reset that. Most likely our fuses are blown, also. I’m just going to remove the lid carefully, take a peek inside, and look for any burned wiring. It looks like the compressor cover is not in place, contactor is sucked in. You can see the capacitor’s good; it’s got a dangling capacitor. We can secure that. That’ll look better. The compressor’s warm, but not too hot to the touch. It could just be matter of being low on Freon.
The first thing really to look for is any burned wiring, which I’m not really seeing. Nothing is jumping out at me at least at this point. Let’s take a peek up at the fan, see and make sure the baffles in place. Nothing’s hit there. Look for any burned wiring up here. Everything looks okay; fan baffle’s all in place. Hard to say; it could be a bad fan capacitor. It could be not kicking on and just the compressor running and then overheated causing the unit to turn off. I’m going to go ahead and replace the fuses since I don’t see anything else really jumping out at me. Everything else looks okay.
Let me show you how to reset this. Let’s go ahead and turn this on and check it out. We’ve got some new fuses. Following the conduit back sometimes can be tricky when you’ve got two units, but here’s the conduit going to the unit. We’re tracing it down to right here. It looks like it’s missing the cover plate, so that may work out in the future. Here are our fuses. Let me go ahead and change out the fuses with new ones. I could test these later with my ohm meter, a multimeter set to ohms. I’ve got some new ones with me so [inaudible: 02:55] Again, just reexamining all the wiring, making sure the thing looks good up there. It really does. Pop in the new fuses in. It’s actually cooled off today. It’s nice up here today; sunny but still not too hot. The wind’s cooling it down.
Here goes popping our fuses in. You can see the power coming in and the power going down to the conduit. The power comes in on the side, ground wire back there, and then the power gets relayed through the fuses down through the wiring at the bottom to the unit. Here goes plugging it in; broke right away. Pop the breaker; probably inside the unit as well as possibly blew the fuses. Not too good. We’ve got something going on, maybe the unit’s shorted out. I’m going to have to show you how to do a scratch test on the compressor to prove whether the compressor’s bad before we just call out and replace this unit. Also, look around a little more carefully for any wiring shorts, which actually I just don’t see any.
I’m going to go ahead and discharge the capacitor. I did hear a sharp shock; it sounded like it came from around this direction. These wires are for a small heater around the base of the compressor. My suspicion is we’ve got a bad compressor. Let me go grab my multimeter and get this thing tested out. Again, I’m going to go ahead and discharge the capacitor and then pull all the leads off the compressor. Then I’m going to go ahead and leave the fan motor connected and test. If this doesn’t blow the breaker then that means our compressor’s bad and it’s time for either a new compressor or as old as this unit is, it may just be time for a whole new unit. I’m just going to position these where they’re not going to touch anything else, the wires, and then that way once we plug it in, then I can go ahead and test it. This way we can just better isolate the system and tell what’s going on.
Here it is; I got the wiring disconnected to my compressor, got my fuses all ready to go. I’m just going to test the fan motor and see if this is actually the compressor that’s causing this to go down. It is as I suspected; the compressor’s got a short in it. We’re going to need either a new compressor or a whole new condenser unit. If I wanted to, I can recycle the fan top, the fan motor, and fan blades. That’s a little bit more advanced troubleshooting and proving that it’s actually our compressor that is down. We can replace the compressor if it’s a clean change out. On this one, I think it’s probably just maybe time for a new unit.