ah for the days before digital. control strategy was really digital back then (except analog timer) , it was just 120V digital 1 or 0. that kind of voltage didin't give you so much trouble over how you attached your thermal sensors - other than that you insulated them well.
i've always hated butt connectors other than solder and heat shrinking so I always used wire nuts carefully taped. get the RTV silicone approach.
but this sounds really frustrating that you are getting wrong voltages off new board and old board. still don't know if it is really fixed.
a lot of stuff can be electrical but with all this circutry crap being add to these new units, couldn't somebody come up with a reliable pressure indicator for the high and low side for a quick indication of cooling system operation.
the one thing that occurs to me is whether the odd frost pattern on the evaporator actually indicates a coolant problem rather than a defrost cycle problem.
how old is this fridge? the one downside of pressure indicators or other service access to the refrigerant circuit is that these are usually pretty bombproof for maybe a 20 year life and adding complexity and access can actually be the source of the leak. although as the master appliantologist has pointed out, you might not get the right pressures not because of a loss of refrigerant but because of dirt/dust clog on condensor, blockage of flow or intermittant or unreliable operation of fans etc. My inquiring mind wishes that every refrigerating appliance in the world had onboard gauges. and in the IC age, there would be nothing to stop them charting the operating pressures and saving snapshots every ,month or so so you could track operation before and after cleaning and over a period that might quickly indicate problems, coolant loss, etc. -- all of this balanced by the problem that coolant control and measurement is unfortunately one of the most likely sources of coolant leaking. when you come up with a refrigerant that has the pressure and physical characteristics to reduce that phenomenon, then you've really got something. because refrigeration is civilization - thus refrigeration repairmen are the centurions of the day -- albeit given our nature we might more -- as I often do -- claim the mantle of archibald tuttle. i.e. the DeNiro character from the movie Brazil.
appreciate being a fly on the wall for this headache because it helps me know I'm not the only one who faces seemingly insurmountable diagnostic issues with these IC refrigerators.
one issue I have is that the GE I last had a part, there was no test facility that I could find for the defrost cycle, so you just had to infer it was busted from symptoms, rather than test it, and you pretty much just replaced all the parts. Maybe this is the wave of the future but my clincal mind gets clincally depressed contemplating it.
time to go off and crack an IPA before noon when I run into this stuff. let us know if you need to bailed out of the drunk tank.
brian
Edited by occidental tourist, 18 March 2013 - 10:53 AM.
