Repair electric fan

Date: 2012

Problem:

This electric fan is over twenty years old. After using it every day during one summer, it eventually requires more time to spinning to its full speed. When it first began to need more time to spin the blades, it only needed few seconds, and then prolonged to ten seconds, and eventually a full minute and finally it would just move slightly and never really again at normal speed.

Diagnosis:

Most fan failure are caused either by the motor starter capacitor, which gives the initial extra current needed to kick start the motor and let the motor continue to operate from the AC power on its own, or there is a thermal cut off fuse (one-time, non resettable) blown. Rarely it is the motor that causes the problem.

In this fan it uses a 400V 2uf film capacitor.

Repair:

With the power off, I replaced the capacitor with an equivalent one. I have two videos here, one very short one using a standing fan and one more elaborated one using a desk fan as examples.

Result:

The fan functions normal again.

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