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
What are strip circuits and how do you read them? What purpose do they serve in troubleshooting? Are they better than normal schematics, worse, or just different?
That's what we explore in this workshop, which is an excerpt of the discussion from one of our latest Live Dojo workshops. Parallel to that, it also acts as something of a part 2 to our previous workshop on DC terminology. These schematics that we show have a number of esoteric and straight up confusing DC terminology, but don't w
In this interactive webinar workshop, we explored an LG gas dryer issue that had stumped an Appliantology tech. We performed a forensic analysis on the troubleshoot to figure out how it could have been improved, and then we moved on to thoroughly examine the circuits and understand how they work.
This and our dozens of other technical training webinar recordings are only viewable by premium tech members at Appliantology.
Topics covered include...
DC and AC loads
Compute
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!
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:
Timer charts may be for old-skool appliances with mechanical timers, but there are still plenty of old-skool appliances knocking around, so reading timer charts remains a vital troubleshooting skill.
That's exactly what we cover in this workshop: how to cohere the timer chart and the schematic, reading them in tandem. Kind of like they're dance partners in the Timer Chart Cha-Cha!
Topics covered in this workshop include:
How to decipher the rows and columns on a timer chart
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
One of the best things we can do to sharpen our skills as techs is to learn from other techs' experiences. There are a number of ways to do that, but the way that's both most convenient and lets you learn from the greatest variety of techs is searching the tech help forums here at Appliantology.
Appliantology has been on the web for 20 years now, and over that time the site has amassed a library of technical knowledge that is unmatched anywhere else. As a member of Appliantology, all of th
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
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
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!
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
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.
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
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
A tech here in the Appliantology forums encountered a GE dryer that was completely dead -- no lights in the UI and no response of any kind. Here's how things went in his words:
Always a bummer when you replace an expensive part and it doesn't resolve the problem. But maybe we can triage this and figure out what could have been done to avoid the unnecessary board replacement.
Here's the schematic for this stacked dryer:
Let's focus in on the places where our tech did his tr
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