Appliantology Live Dojo, Saturday, 3/1/2025 @10 AM ET

Big turnout for last week's Live Dojo! The topic was protecting both yourself from lawsuits and the customer from harm or even death. Our guest, Aaron Wilson, shared some jaw-dropping photos and stories of appalling incompetence that killed a customer!  Lots of lively conversation and good questions. 

The single most important asset a tech needs to possess in order to minimize liability and protect the customer is technical competence. This means both mechanical AND electrical skills. For electrical skills, this means understanding things like wire ampacity, correct circuit breaker sizing, the consequences of loose electrical connections and, of course, how electricity works. And since we cannot watch how electricity works like we might do with a transmission, for example, that means we can only understand it by understanding Ohms Law.

If you missed last week's Dojo, here's an important excerpt where Aaron explains how understanding Ohms Law transformed the way he troubleshoots: 

Tech members at Appliantology can watch the video of the entire session here: 

Come join us in this upcoming Live Dojo and be part of the conversation! 

Special topic for this Live Dojo. This was brought to us by an MST student who ran a call on an Electrolux dryer. Error code 63: "heater short" (really grounded).

When he ran the call, sure enough the element was grounded. 

His question was, "How did the dryer correctly know that the element was grounded vs. open or normal?"

Here's the schematic for the dual heating element circuit:

Simple circuit, right? Yet understanding how the dryer control board senses the state of the element in this circuit requires understanding voltage vs. voltage drop and loads in series. In other words, Ohm's Law in series circuits. This is one of things we'll talk about in this upcoming Live Dojo. Hope to see you there!