In this forum topic, the tech was working on a dryer that shut down a few minutes into a cycle:
In addition to having trouble putting the unit into diagnostic mode, there were some other odd symptoms too:
Normally, you would suspect the thermal overload in the case of a motor shutting down shortly into a cycle. However, the other odd symptoms clued Brother igloo into the true cause:
The selector switch in this model is a little electronic variable resistor, and it's a common
One of the many fine techs here at Appliantology posted his story with a Maytag washer that wouldn't spin in the Appliantology forums.
The initial situation in his words:
On top of this, there was one more strange symptom:
Given this strange behavior, he was understandably thrown on how to proceed.
After changing all those parts, no resolution! But finally, he found the issue:
Lesson learned indeed! And thank you for sharing your hard earned lesson with us. Now we a
Some seasoned Appliantologists had a good topic in the forums where they posted some warnings for posterity about some easy-to-solve, but nonetheless tricky gotchas that you can encounter when working on laundry appliances. I figured they should be archived here so more people can keep these simple tips in mind.
First up, Brother Coley described an issue he encountered that had him scratching his head:
The root of the problem? Well...
Don't worry, Coley -- we've all been there
There are all kinds of reasons to become an appliance repair tech. The trade is profitable, in high demand, offers a good work-life balance, satisfying, practical, and all manner of other flattering adjectives. On top of all that, as I mentioned in a previous post, appliance repair is a future-proof skill -- new developments like AI don't pose a threat to a tech's career.
If you're a technically minded person who enjoys problem solving, you'll do very well in appliance repair -- this makes
It's about time I talked about this in one of these posts -- the AI revolution is upon us.
Okay, it's not quite Skynet yet, but it's still spelling disaster for a lot of different jobs.
Some are already halfway out the door, like many repetitive and administrative jobs: customer service, scheduling, and data entry, to name a few.
But they're just the start. Many other positions that are often thought of as requiring more skill and education are prime for the silicon harvest:
Let's say you get called out to fix an ice maker that has frozen over. You show up at the job, open 'er up, and this is what you see:
Another angle:
What do you think happened here? What could have caused that kind of damage to the walls of this ice box?
Let us know what you think in the comments! Or, if you're stumped, you can read the topic this scenario comes from and learn how it happened yourself.
A tech here in the Appliantology forums ran into this issue with a Viking refrigerator:
As it turns out, BrianG had the solution:
This is a known problem that they have a whole heater kit for: 016616-000. All our tech needs to do is slap that in and his days of defrosting this fridge's air ducts should be over!
A tech here in the Appliantology forums ran into a surprising customer complaint about a microwave: it's doing its job too well! They say that it's cooking food way faster and way hotter than it used to.
(The above picture is a slight dramatization.)
So, our tech took a reasonable step and measured the amps going to the microwave. After all, if the magnetron is producing more watts than expected, it will have to be drawing more amps.
Measuring Power Consumption
His meas
How do you put an ice maker that looks like this into a test harvest?
The tech sheet has this to say about starting a test:
That tracks with the old classic Whirlpool ice makers, but there's no T or H test terminals to be seen here. So what gives?
Well, it looks like there might be a test button here, if we look closely...
Turns out, that tech sheet is just outdated and flat-out wrong. You need to press this button twice within 3 seconds with a thin, pokey i
An Appliantologist in the forums ran into a bE error on an LG dishwasher, which perplexed him. In his words:
A bubble error would seem to indicate oversudsing, but our tech said that wasn't the case.
Fortunately, Brother Slav had the answer for us:
Turns out, this so-called "bubble error" can mean all kinds of problems that have nothing to do with suds, such as a leveling issue:
Or a problem with the pump:
You can check out the full list of bE error code
Are the dispenser heater and fill tube heater in series or parallel? Or perhaps they're neither?
BONUS QUESTION: If both heaters have 6.3 kohms of resistance, roughly what resistance would you expect to read from pin 1 to pin 2 of the connector?
Sound off in the comments!
A tech here in the Appliantology forums ran into a Whirlpool dual-evaporator refrigerator with a frozen fresh-food evaporator, and it caused him to ask the following question about troubleshooting it:
Sounds like a fun challenge -- let's figure out how much testing we can get done in a 30-minute service call.
The name of the game when it comes to saving time is keeping disassembly to a minimum. All of our troubleshooting techniques will either require no disassembly, or they'll
In a topic right here at Appliantology, a tech encountered a perplexing issue with an ice maker that wouldn't make ice. His diagnostics were as follows, in his words:
The E5 error code does implicate the ice maker thermistor, according to the tech sheet. So, our tech proceeded with the following repair:
And so he was left for a bit of a loss -- that is, until some helpful techs pointed him in the right direction on Appliantology.
In particular, Daniel A gave him some great ins
A tech here at Appliantology recently ran into a dryer that would not start. As he explains in his post:
After he's already changed the start switch, what could be the problem here?
Well, as several techs in that topic helpfully pointed out, even if you replace the start switch itself, there is a common failure of the plastic button itself that prevents the switch from being actuated.
As esteemed Appliantology brother Rhubarb Tau explained:
Here's a picture of what that
Let's take a look at the interlock switches in a Kitchenaid microwave-oven combo unit with a simple question to answer: which of the microwave interlock switches should be closed when the door is closed, and which should be open?
Here's the schematic for this model with the switches in question circled:
Should be simple enough to find the answer to our question. In fact, most schematics worth their salt tell you the state the unit is in as shown. Ours has just such a note:
How do you troubleshoot a dryer that heats all the time, even when a cycle isn't running? That's exactly the scenario that a tech here in the Appliantology forums ran into, and even after replacing the timer multiple times, the problem persisted. Let's get to the bottom of this.
Here's the schematic, with the heater circled in green.
Something important to note about this dryer: it's an old-school dryer with a mechanical timer. No electronics in sight here!
What we need to f
A tech in the Repair forums here at Appliantology was trying to troubleshoot an inop evaporator fan motor, and he had some trouble figuring out what to make of his measurements.
Let's take a look at the schematic in question and see if we can clear up the confusion.
Oh boy, that's a tangled one! I've circled the refrigerator evaporator fan motor in question.
We can tell a few things about this fan immediately. The Vcc and GND designations show that this is a DC fan motor. Vc
A tech here in the Appliance Repair Tech Help forum recently ran into a conundrum: the range he was working on had an open bake valve, but there was also no voltage going to either the bake or the broil valve from the DSI control board. So is this just an issue with that open valve, or does the board need to be replaced as well?
To find our answer, let's first look at the schematic for this range.
Circled, from left to right, are the bake and broil relays, the bake and broil valv
I wanted to highlight a recent topic in the Appliantology forums because it showcases a few good teaching points -- and because it had some fun pictures.
Here's the initial setup that the OP gave in his post about an electric dryer:
There's a very important tidbit in there: someone other than the tech did work on this previously. Maybe another tech, maybe the customer -- we don't know. We'll circle back to why that's so important.
The OP continued:
So, over the course of
Take a look at the defrost circuit on this Whirlpool refrigerator:
Looks pretty standard -- there's just a defrost heater and a defrost terminator in the circuit, and voltage is supplied to the circuit by the control board.
But what is the purpose of the wire marked in green that tags off to J1-3?
If you look closely, you'll see that that pin on the control is labeled D-SENSE -- so that's a sensing line. This means that the purpose of that wire is to give the control board i
An interesting topic came up here in the Appliantology forums a little while back:
The tech was working on an electric dryer that was DOA -- no lights, no response to button presses. He put his multimeter to the LoZ setting (as you should always do when making AC voltage measurements!), and he started checking for the power supply to the appliance at the terminal block. Here's what he got:
L1 to N: 0 VAC
L2 to N: 120 VAC
L1 to L2: 20 VAC -- and while the meter leads are held
You would think that there wouldn't be a lot going on with an oven's convection fan motor -- and you would be wrong! This Viking convection fan has a number of interesting elements in its circuit that we're going to explore in this post.
1. Is that a 240 VAC power supply for a fan motor? Turns out that you can actually run a fan on 240 VAC if you want to (and if the fan has the proper specs for it). There are even certain benefits to doing so.
2. Not just one, but two capacitors in the
These aren't your grandma's ignition systems -- these are systems that use a DSI (Direct Spark Ignition) board, and that means you've got algorithms involved.
If you want to troubleshoot a DSI system, you need to understand this algorithm -- it's how the board thinks. Is the DSI board not sending any voltage to the electrodes? Well, it might just be in lockout mode after a failed ignition, meaning the problem lies elsewhere than the board. You can't troubleshoot a system if you don't know h
Be warned: this week's troubleshooting scenario is somewhat chilling...
...or maybe not, since the problem is that the ice dispenser isn't working. In fact, the entire fridge shuts down when the ice dispenser is activated. How can this be? Well, in this recording from one of our biweekly Live Dojo workshops, we go over the relatively simple cause to this strange issue.
Loading down is the culprit here. That's when a faulty load grounds out the control board's DC power supply, causing a
More than any other AC load, motors are all about amps.
What do I mean by that? When you have a motor that is misbehaving, the best, most informative electrical test you can do by far is amps. And one of the worst mistakes you could make is to just rely on ohms when testing a motor.
In this recording from one of our biweekly Live Dojo workshops, we go over several different aspects of troubleshooting motors.
Thermal controls are the first order of business. All AC motors have an i
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