Samurai Appliance Repair Man's Blog

January 31, 2012

Confused again, dang me! What's going on with the heater relay, looks like half a transformer sticking out of it, stepping down to 24 VAC? If that's just a solenoid coil, where do they get the 24 volts? I've never seen one labeled like that, but then, I only see old stuff.

January 31, 2012

Howdy, jb, good questions!

This is an old Maytag stack laundry unit. The washer is the old Maytag Dependable care washer. That should give you some idea how old this unit is!

The "transformer" you're asking about on the heater relay is the relay coil. All relays have a coil, that's how they their relaying: the coil gets energized by a low voltage circuit (usually DC, as in this case, but not always) and this makes the switch contacts in the relay switch, usually much higher AC voltage. The motor relay in the diagram works the same way.

The coil voltage for the relay comes from the microprocessor control board.

February 1, 2012

Aha! It's DC! I didn't pick up on that. So that's why the coil is labeled like that! Otherwise I'd expect to see 26 VAC there, like the transformer says. So somewhere on the board is a rectifier sending out DC for control voltage.

On HVAC equipment I've never seen that.

And thanks mucho for the response - electrical is my weak spot and I need to work on it constantly. I wouldn't make much progress without help from the masters.

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How to fix a Maytag stack laundry unit with a 9E error on the dryer

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