Overheard a supply house guy say something that made my stomach drop

I was at Ferguson's yesterday picking up a condenser fan motor and heard one of their counter guys telling a customer that if you use a universal start capacitor on a 20 year old fridge compressor, it'll run fine for maybe 6 months then kill the windings. I've used them before on older units and never had a call back, but now I'm second guessing myself. Has anyone else seen long term damage from using universals on old compressors?

2 comments

2 Comments

mitchell.shane4d ago

Wait, "kill the windings" is a pretty wild claim. I mean, I've slapped universal start caps on all kinds of old junk and never had one come back either. That guy at the counter must have had one really bad experience to say something that confident. It's possible he's just repeating some old timer legend that got passed down. But then again, maybe I've just been lucky and those compressors were already on their way out, so the cap didn't matter. It's got me wondering now if I should start checking inrush currents or something, idk.

noahw534d ago

Has anybody looked at what the start cap actually does to the compressor windings when it stays in the circuit too long? I mean, those universal caps are supposed to drop out after a split second, but some of these cheap ones have a bad internal relay or the timing circuit drifts off. You slap one on an old compressor and it might be dragging the start winding along way longer than it should, heating it up inside. I had a buddy who cooked a compressor on a walk-in cooler because he didn't realize his universal cap was sticking for like 3 seconds instead of a half second. Maybe that counter guy saw a few of those failures and just blamed the cap itself.