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The amount of techs I see skipping the amp draw check on compressors is wild
I was on a call last week for a fridge not cooling, and the guy before me swapped the overload and relay twice. He never put his meter on it. The compressor was pulling 22 amps on a unit rated for 6.5. That's a locked rotor, not a bad start component. It's a five second check that saves a customer a $300 part and a callback. I see this at least once a month on shared jobs. How many of you still run into this, and what's your go-to method for diagnosing a compressor before you touch anything else?
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lucas1651mo ago
Man, that's rough. Saw something similar with a bad capacitor once. Tech kept swapping the contactor, but the real issue was a weak cap letting the compressor struggle on every start. It finally locked up after a week of that. You could hear it groaning for a second before the contactor clicked. Simple voltage check at the cap would've shown it.
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the_amy1mo ago
Had a unit groan like that last month.
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