Here’s your two for Tuesday on a Sunday! The most obvious is the swarm of dehumidifiers, some of which look a little naked.
The small one on the left is the first one. After diagnosis, I discovered that the compressor was shorted out. Well that’s clearly not fixable, can use it for parts though.
The one on the right is number two! Compressor ran but fan wouldn’t turn. The control unit is sending power, but fan won’t turn. These fans need much higher voltage to turn so the transformer may be roached. Theoretically fixable, didn’t spend a lot of time on it and got number three. I’ll come back to this one at a later date and see if I can get it running too, robbing parts from 1 should do the trick.
The middle one up front is number three. Plug it in, turn it on, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP……you get the picture. It’s not a digital unit so it doesn’t throw codes. Couldn’t get it into diagnostic mode so what’s next? Well, if I swap the electronics from 2 into 3, I’ll have a digital display. A little cutting and splicing of wires and voila! Kind of. It threw a code, bad coil temperature sensor. Steal that from 2 as well and IT RUNS!
Only problem is that it freezes up its cooling coil. There’s a number of potential issues, too cold in the room so not enough warm air comes across to melt it. Dirty filters or coils so there’s no air movement. Or it just doesn’t activate its defrost cycle. Can’t do much about the third, I removed the filter, and the temperature was close to the problem zone but I didn’t think that was quite it. I cleaned the heater coil behind the cooling coil, it still iced up, then I had a brainwave, if I put all the shrouds back on it’ll stop the air from coming from the sides and the top between the coils and bypassing the cooling coil. I’m 2 hours in as of writing this and it seems to be a success. More air across the coil has made it so there’s NO ICE!
Moral of the story is;
- Clean the filter and coils
- The shrouds will direct air so if it’s freezing up without them, try putting them back on
- Digital controllers are better because they display codes instead of just beep
You might be thinking, you said this was a double feature, a two for. You’ve talked about dehumidifiers and unless you can’t count and think 3 is the same as 2, that seems like only part 1 of the two for.
You got me! This next one is less obvious though. It’s not the rock collection or vacuum cleaner. If you look really REALLY closely, you can see coils of wire and a plastic bag just to the right of that. Those 2 things and a little elbow grease resulted in extra light under the stairs. A couple LED pot lights go a long way to brightening up the joint! Wire them into the same circuit as the existing lonesome light on the wall and you can actually see what you’re doing!
You know what? Why not call this a three for Thursday! The wooden shelves above the plastic bag are brought to you, well me, well really my wife, by spare wood, some glue, and effort on the part of my father in law. After which I can cut to size and work around the drain access and create extra storage on 2 walls. Somehow we could still use extra space under there.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. Electrical, shelving, appliance repair, you name it, I like to tackle it!