Just found out why those 10 year old fridges keep dying, it's the condenser fan motor capacitor all along

Pulled a service manual for a 2014 model the other day and it said the cap is rated for 10,000 hours but the fan motor housing is sealed so the heat kills it at 8,000, so I'm wondering how many units I've replaced that only needed a 12 dollar part, anyone else seen this stat in their training docs?

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amy97521d ago

I read a repair blog last month that said the same exact thing, they tested 40 units and found the caps failing at around 7,500 to 8,500 hours pretty consistently. The heat from the sealed motor housing is the killer, and the cap is rated for less than the motor itself, so it's basically a planned failure point. It's wild that a blown cap can mimic a bad compressor or start relay, so people just swap the whole fridge instead of checking the ohms on the cap first.