– Man you hear this humming
form this air compressor here? Does you ac unit try to come on and you hear it humming like
this but the fans not blowing? Well today we're going to
show you how to repair that and it starts right now. (upbeat music) Hey everybody, Jeff here again and
welcome back to our channel where we give you world
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engineering disasters and tool reviews. And of course today we're
doing this engineering disaster here. And if your not subscribed to our channel, man what are you waiting for? Go ahead and click on
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single video that we upload. Cause you won't want to
miss any of our videos. But this video today, if your successful, your gonna save yourself
$150-$200 in having an AC repair person come out to fix your air conditioning unit here. So let's get right into it.
So here you can see, you can hear it all humming and everything like its wanting to do something. But it just doesn't want to go. Okay, so the first
things you have to do is, you got to shut the power to the unit. Now almost every air
conditioner has either like a switch, a power switch next to it. Or one of the yank able types of fuses. So in this case, we're gonna turn it off. Now it's nice and quiet again, and now we're gonna open it up and see what's wrong in there. Okay, so you first have to
remove the access panel. And it's usually held down
with two quarter inch screws.
So I typically like to use my quarter inch screw socket here. Pull that one off over there, and then we'll have another
one over here to do. Once you have your two
screws out of the way, now you can pull the access panel. Now some of you may have an access panel on the side of the unit,
and that's fine too. But they all generally work the same way.
All right, so lets take
a little roll call here now that we have the unit open and we'll just show you
the main players here. There's really not a whole lot here. That big black part right
there is the compressor. And that's usually not
what fails in these. It's usually some of these
support parts that fail.
And then of course the
fan with the blower motor is right back here underneath. This right here is your starter relay, so it gets it's power
right here from the main line and it will tell the compressor and the blower fan to turn on. These are the outputs over here. And then right here is
the run capacitor here. So you see how it's
got the two wires here, the purple wire here. And this guy here will
go down and tell the compressor to turn on. So this is a large capacitor, that we'll pull out here for you to see. See this, it's almost the size of a can of coke. This is typically a 35 to
40 microfarad capacitor and it'll say it right on there. See, 35 plus 5 microfarad. So and this is rated at 370 volts, so this is usually the culpit. Now let me show you, this one looks like
it's in good condition. It doesn't look like
there's anything wrong. When these fail, nine times out of 10 it's pretty obvious because the capacitor will be bulging right around here, it might
balloon out a little bit and that's how you know it's gone bad.
Cause it's trying to explode basically. And then over here is
this other capacitor, this is a smaller one. It's a 10 microfarad capacitor. This one is the capacitor
for the fan blower. So what these capacitors
do is they store energy and voltage. And when it's time for
the compressor to turn on, the compressor will get some power and energy from this cap. And if there isn't any in there, then it's not going to turn on. Same thing with the fan, if the fan doesn't see any energy coming out of this capacitor
it's not going to turn on. Or your relay output could be bad here. So let's figure out which it is.
Okay, so first and foremost
what you should do is take pictures of where all the wiring was so you don't forget which
way things get connected. And then we want to
disconnect the capacitor here, the big run capacitor because
we're going to measure the microfarad. So you just pull out the orange wire here and the purple wire there. And now you have the capacitor out in free to move about the country. Okay, so I'm using my Klein Tools MM400 digital multimeter. I have a much better fluke
meter but it's currently at another job site right now. So I have it as you can see, it's set over here to capacitor. That is the symbol right
there for capacitor, when you see the two little
parallel lines there. So it's set to capacitor mode and we are now going to try to measure it and see what it's giving
us for capacitance here. Okay, so we're measuring
about three microfarads. That's not good, that's way too low. Because as you know, this is a 35 microfarad capacitor here. And so we should be
seeing somewhere between 30 or 40 microfarads and
we're only seeing three.
Let me just take the measurement again, and see cause there's
a lot of rust on here. Yeah, so no matter what we do we're getting only 3 microfarads. So this could be one of those cases where the can is bad but
it didn't balloon up. Okay, so here I'm also going to disconnect the fans capacitor. And we'll get him measured up too. Alright, so I'm going to take my leads and put them across the terminals there.
And we're not even measuring
any microfarads at all. It's showing nanofarads,
which is even worse. So that says to me that
maybe this little capacitor here is spent. I'm supposed to be reading, as you can see right there on the label, 10 microfarads. And I'm not getting pretty much anything. That's negligible what I'm getting. So, we're gonna try replacing these two. Okay now let me just
warn you something about air conditioning repair, when you call the air
conditioning repair company.
And they come out to repair
your air compressor here, if they find that the
problem is your capacitor here this big one. They're going to charge you $150 (alarming buzz) but we're going
to show you how to replace this yourself for like next to nothing. Okay so I just went and picked up the replacement cap for this one at a local air conditioning supply house. And this capacitor here, this run capacitor for this
air conditioner is $10. And remember, the air conditioning repair
company is going to charge you $150 for it. This little capacitor here for the fan, this is the fan motor capacitor. So this capacitor was only six dollars. So I just came back from
the ac supply house, okay my local air conditioner
parts supply house charged me $16 total for these two capacitors right here. That we're going to use to repair our air compressor with. So that's how you save money folks, and we're gonna show you
how to do it yourself so you won't pay anybody and labor costs. So we have our new capacitors here. And we going to pull it out.
And so when you go to buy it, you always want to make sure your checking the ratings see.
So your looking for this 35-5 we call it. So 35 microfarads. And you want that same
operating voltage there, that 370 volts. And 370. So the newer ones appear to be a little shorter than the older ones. So now what we're going to do is get the old one out of the way, and we're going to test the
capacitance on this one here. And let's see what we get here. It's calculating and here we go. 34.67 microfarads, so this is right smack dab in the middle of the range where it should be. So that says to me that it pretty much confirms that the other capacitor was indeed bad. Okay now that we know the new one measures up good, lets pull out the old one and we're going to compare it. We're going to compare
these two capacitors and you can see it's got the same rating. The 10 microfarads, 10 microfarads. So lets go ahead and measure it. Let's see what the Klein Meter tells us, and we get, it's calculating.
There we go, 10.24 microfarads so he's right smack dab in the middle of his
operating range there. So we know we have two
good capacitors right now. So lets go ahead and hook those up and we'll see if that solves our problem. With this air compressor not working but yet it's still humming. But we'll go ahead and see
if this will fix the problem. Alright, so we're going to slide the capacitor back into
the position it was in. In the same orientation, now I remember this mark here was facing to the right there like that. And the purple lead, as you recall was connected up here. And the orange lead was connected right here onto the capacitor.
Okay, so the run capacitor
for this air compressor unit is now installed. Now we're going to take
the other capacitor here for the fan motor. Okay so we're taking
the fan motor capacitor, and this brown cord was here. The other brown conductor with the white stripe was here. Doesn't matter which one
of these around the corner you plug it onto. They have these on here, multiple contact points in case you have other wires in there. I'm going to put this in the box here because for some reason they didn't leave a place for it. I mean we could leave it out, but I'll just protect the unit a little bit by putting it in the box. If your wondering if it's
gonna be a fire hazard, I wouldn't worry about it. Your inside of a metal enclosure here. And it's better to insulate
this guy and protect him then to leave him out in the open.
And in fact, this is exactly what the
previous air conditioning company had done too. Alright, so now that both
of our capacitors are installed in the external
air compressor unit here. We are about to fire up
the ac compressor here and see if it comes on. Okay lets flip the switch back
on and see if she starts up. Yes! There she blows! (laughing) Come on, and there it is folks, there is your lovely fan spinning around beautifully doing it's job. Can I get an Amen brothers? That's right, your not getting reemed today folks. Because you now have a
functioning air conditioner. Well you can see we have a nice perfectly running air conditioner.
This was another successful repair here. And if you found this useful, we'd appreciate it if you give
us a thumbs up down below. And once again, make sure you hit that subscribe button down below so you don't miss a single one of our uploads and then hit the grey bell icon next to it. Thank you so much for tuning in. If this repair helped you, hey go ahead and let us know down in the comments below. It would be helpful to everybody else that comes by to check out this
video as well alright. So anyway, that's it for this week folks. Thank you so much for tuning in, we appreciate each and everyone of you.
And we will see you on the next one..