Troubleshoot and fix an electrical appliance - electricity.straw.fix PEP BB

My electric stove has an intermittent problem. Sometimes the heating elements work, sometimes not. This required some trouble shooting. The fan works, but no heat. Turns out the first thing I checked was the issue. I looked at the junction box for the whip and saw flashes of light and heard some sizzling sounds. So, fire hazard. The whip has bad connections and is undersized. Thankfully that's all it ended up being.

A while ago I started having issues with my off-grid solar power system.  It would just shut off, losing all power, and then shortly there after come back on.  This was while there was lots of sun and I've got a new battery bank so lack of power shouldn't be the issue.  I was however at the time running electric space heaters to take advantage of "free" power to heat my place.  I make sure to do this only when there is excess solar power so I am not consuming beyond the capacity of what is being immediately generated by the sun.  No need for any extra strain on the expensive batteries!

My immediate suspicion was something overheating.  After shutting down it could naturally cool down some until the thermal protection shut off came back on, hence the short time before powering up again.  I'd go out to the building where the inverter is immediately and could smell that bad sign of overheating electronics.  So why is the inverter overheating?  My first hope was just that the vent ports were too obstructed with dust and cobwebs to allow enough air flow.  There was plenty of said dusty cobwebs, but that didn't seem to be the issue so I investigated further, digging into the scary looking guts of the system.  The next logical problem would be the cooling fans.  Like the inverter itself they are about 8 years old.  

After determining that these were 12 volt fans I got out a 12 volt battery to try powering them up to see how they run.  (I didn't want the inverter system powered up with all the guts exposed and easily able to be short circuited so that stays powered down whenever I'm inside working on it!)  To test the fans I got some scrap wire and stripped/trimmed it down so just a single strand could be inserted into the pin slots on the fan plug.  Then got the other ends of the wires to make contact with the battery terminals in order to apply power to the fans.  One worked just fine the other was very sick and barely moving.  This one would also not spin freely even without power.  I'm pretty sure I found the problem!

Since both fans are equally old and I assume have an equal number of hours on them I decided to replace them both.  They were measured and I shopped around on-line until I found replacements the right size, selecting the models that has the highest CFM air flow.  They might be louder than others, but since this is in a separate building I don't really care about the noise level.  Air flow is more important.  

I did have to get some new long thin driver bits to access some of the screws, but once I had the tools and parts it wasn't that hard to remove the old fans and install the new ones.  I put everything back together and then tested it out placing the inverter under a heavy load until the fans should kick on.  Sure enough they did.  I would say they may even be a tad bit quieter than the old ones too.  In order to show this working I held a piece of toilet paper over the vent so you can see it being blown upward.

This is my BB submission for troubleshooting and fixing an electrical appliance.

The last several weeks, my toaster had become more and more reluctant to keep the lever down to complete the toasting cycle. Eventually, the lever just wouldn't stay down at all. Now, a toaster is a relatively simple appliance, and there are two principal things which go wrong: 1) the element burns out, breaking the circuit and 2) the electromagnet which holds down the lever (in modern toasters anyway) gets caked with crumbs/dust and no longer has the strength to hold the lever down.

I tested the difference by forcing the lever down and holding it; the toaster started heating up. Vigorously shaking crumbs out of the toaster temporarily fixed the issue, but it began failing again within a couple days.

All this led me to believe that the issue was that there was some buildup on the electromagnet inside the toaster. I'd probably knocked some crumbs off of it, but built-up gunk remained. In order to clean it off, I needed to open it up. This ended up being slightly more challenging than necessary, as it for some reason was constructed with triangular screws, meaning I had to take a break to get a cheap, damaged screwdriver from the dump's recycle shop, file it down with a dremel, and then open her up. The electromagnet was quite dirty and I cleaned off with a toothbrush. I cleaned off the rest of the interior as well while I was in there.

After reassembly (and gluing part of the case I accidentally damaged while opening it up), it worked! Been happily toasting since!

Shop Vac stopped working

My shopvac suddenly stopped working. It’s a month old and had some pretty heavy use during it’s short life. It felt a bit hot, so I left it for an hour, thinking there was some kind of over heating sensor that had tripped. I was only using it to vacuum the car, so it wasn’t being taxed.

My options were:
1) See if I could find the receipt, return to Home Depot, but I bought it 70+ miles away.
2) Buy a new one on Amazon with a monthly subscription for a 5% discount!
3) See if I could find out what was wrong and fix it myself with the help of Permies.

I went for option 3 and started a thread Fixing a wire connected to a motor - learnt a load of stuff and got the problem fixed for free!

It was pretty easy to disassemble, everything held together with  Philips headed screws.


I removed the outer shell and disconnected the switch


I then removed some plastic bracing to expose the motor which was under a plastic cap held on with clips. This gave me access to the electrics and I noticed the black wire was disconnected. I posted my findings in the thread above as I don’t have much experience of this kind of electronics.


There were some great suggestions and I chose to go for a wire nut - it didn’t require skills like soldering or crimping tools. My lovely neighbour is a horder and he had a spare wire nut. I carefully extracted a length of wire from under the zip ties, to discover that the plastic wasn’t the outer layer of a wire but thermal shrink stuff.




Underneath was a crimped clip. I removed a similar length of sheath of the broken wire and both sections fitted snuggly in the wire nut, which I twisted on to get a solid connection.


I reinstalled the plastic cap over the motor making sure the nut was outside and nothing could move with the vibrations from the motor.


After reassembling the vac worked! As I mentioned in my thread, if I had gone for the first option, receipt in hand, chances are, I’d walk away with a new vac and old one would go into landfill. I now know more and have a new skill. Makes you think . . .

[youtube]https://youtube.com/shorts/oEjlb_wCEo4?feature=share[/youtube]

Having somehow missed this entry, I originally posted this to oddball, but this is a perfect fit so I'm porting it over.

I have an electric dehydrator (I know, I know...a big ol' solar dehydrator is on the to-do list), but it stopped working. I just bought it a couple years ago and it works great except for, y'know, not working. I contacted their tech support and on their recommendation, bought a replacement fuse for six bucks. I did this all three months ago, but it wasn't dehydrator season, so I just sat on the new part until this morning when I cut onion blossoms from which I want to extract seeds, and had to get the dehydrator running again. I'll narrate the job in the captions below.

On troubleshooting: I approached the dehydrator to turn it on and noticed the LED panel was all black. I thought I remembered that even when turned on, it shows signs of life. I checked the plug, verified that it was plugged into a live outlet, messed with the buttons on the front panel to make sure I couldn't stimulate any response, and then examined the back panel to look for a screw-out fuse or circuit reset button. When I found nothing, I contacted the manufacturer before just taking it apart. Since they were responsive and knowledgeable, I didn't really have to diagnose the problem beyond that.

If anyone's interested in this machine, here's an Amazon link to it because it's handy.

I think this issue with my oven fits here because it turned out to be the burned out motor, but I'm open to moving it.
My wife ran the self cleaning cycle on the oven as she has done many times in the past but this time the door lock failed to release.
After trying all the steps from the manual to see if it would reset I finally had to resort to getting a wire snaked behind the door and forcing the lock out of the way.
After I had the door open I tried some of the reset steps again.


With the help of my ears I could tell that the issue was a burned out motor.


Old lock pulled out


After looking for replacement locks I had sticker shock for a new item. Thankfully I was able to get a used replacement from ebay for 1/6th the price. Here is the lock ready to wire.


New lock wired and ready to install


Installed and error cleared


I'm glad I took pictures as I took the trim off or I might not have figured it out where all the screws went.


Fixed

Mike Haasl wrote:This is a badge bit (BB) that is part of the PEP curriculum.  Completing this BB is part of getting the straw badge in Electricity.

In this Badge Bit, you will fix an electrical appliance.  Fridge not working quite right?  Toaster only toasts on one side?  Let's fix that appliance!

There are youtube videos for nearly any type of appliance issue and repair so do some digging to figure out what is wrong, what parts you may need and how to do the job.

To complete this BB, the minimum requirements are:
  - fix a problem with an electrical appliance
  - more complicated that replacing a light bulb
  - must be an electrical issue for this BB

Electrical points earned vary from 1/2 to 4 points
 - the points awarded are up to the certifier based on the challenge of the troubleshooting and the complexity of the repair
 - replacing a heat element is likely to be low on the range
 - replacing circuit boards and motors and rat eaten wires is likely to be high on the range

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, provide proof of the following as pics or video (less than two minutes):
  - the broken appliance before you start your project
  - explanation of what was broken, how you troubleshot it and how you fixed it
  - the parts you bought (if applicable)
  - the parts you replaced (if applicable)
  - the appliance at maximum point of disassembly
  - the appliance reassembled

In this instance, it's an electrical problem with a gas appliance - the ignitors are running constantly, not just when one initiates any particular burner. Research turned up one or more ignitor switches as being the most likely culprit, but this is a pretty old stove, and the individual switches are no longer available. There's a listing on Amazon showing a wiring harness with all 4 switches attached and claiming to be a correct match for our model number stove, so we bought it (for just over $100, which was theoretically cheaper than a single switch if we had more than one that was bad).

My wife sorta panicked when I started taking pics, because the stove top was dirty... She grabbed the burner grates and ran off to wash them, but I reminded her that this was an electrical BB, so I wasn't being graded on how shiny the stovetop was...

The part shows up, but it's NOT an exact match for our stove - the "D" shaped holes in the switches were way too small to fit our regulator shafts, and since it's "D" shaped, I can't just drill them out larger. They'll have to be carved/filed out by hand... Annoying but doable.

Next problem - the keyed openings didn't come anywhere close to matching the original ones, so they wouldn't ignite at the correct spot on the dial;they were all over the dial. Further disassembly of one of the switches showed that the cam on the hub wasn't aligned the same as our stove required, but I'd already enlarged the openings. I even tried rotating the switch assemblies to get the cam in the right area, but the connecting wires between the switches was not long enough, and this is some particularly high temperature wire, so I didn't feel comfortable just substituting generic wire.  Back to Amazon for another set...  At least it's still cheaper than buying a new gas stove (with a double oven) by a long shot.

This time, I disassembled each of the switches to ID where the cam was aiming, and then carved a new opening with the correct orientation. Testing the harness assembly with an ohm meter showed them shorting out (the switches were closing) at the correct places on the dials, so I put it all back together and tested it with gas/fire. It Works!