Was swapping out a control board on a 20 year old fridge yesterday

It was a Frigidaire model from like 2004, out in a garage near Minnetonka. I got the new board in, fired it up, and the compressor kicked on but then the whole thing just hummed and clicked off after 30 seconds. Turned out the old capacitor was barely holding a charge and had to swap that too, which I didn't catch at first. Has anyone else had a simple board swap turn into a whole afternoon of chasing secondary failures like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

luna5892d ago

And you ALWAYS bet the capacitor's the real culprit on those old Frigidaire boards, they just suck the life right out of em.

skyler_adams2d ago

Capacitors get blamed for everything but half the time it's a bad solder joint or a relay that's welded itself shut... you can swap out a cap and get a false positive for a week, then the real problem shows back up. Those old Frigidaire boards are more prone to cracked traces from heat cycling than capacitor failure anyway. Just throwing a new cap in there without checking the voltage divider network is asking for a callback. A lot of techs swap caps as a quick fix and never actually diagnose the root cause. That's how you end up replacing the same board three months later.