Run Capacitor Failed

regularguy

Yesterday my furnace would not run so I went down to investigate and after a reset I noticed that everything worked as it should except that the blower would not run and when the blower didn't run the unit would shutdown. At first I thought that the motor had failed as I could smell something burnt and about a year ago I replaced the motor and capacitor with a Dayton model and it was much less expensive than the incumbent GE model so I didn't expect it to last too long. To my suprise the motor was fine but when I tested the capacitor it showed open, when I pulled the capacitor out it looked like me after a big Thanksgiving meal - bulged out and just about ready to split open. I replaced the capacitor with the exact same Dayton model, but the new capacitor was slightly larger in size than the old one which I took to be a good sign as bigger is always better - right? My question is what would cause a 1 year old run capacitor to fail just out of the clear blue sky? I am thinking cheap poor quality from China and that I should probably have replaced it with a American made capacitor for twice the price. With out thinking about it too much I purchased 2 Dayton capacitors so that I would have one for a spare, but now I'm questioning that logic. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I may post over on the HVAC board as well but I thought this was more of an electrical question that HVAC. Thanks

ddawg16

Capacitors fail.....in electronics, it's the most common failure....

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TarheelTerp

what size capacitor was on the old motor?
who specified the substitutions?

sized right... it should have lasted longer than a year.

regularguy

The capacitor was sized by Dayton for that motor. 370 VAC (VCA) 15 MFD I didn't dig into sizing the capacitor I simply went with the one that they told me I needed for the motor. The motor is the exact same size as the one that came out of the furnace, it is just made by another manufacturer and made in China along with the capacitors. I agree that a capacitor is often the component that fails but it should last for longer than a year, the orginal lasted for more than 10.

ddawg16

If the capacitor was sized wrong, it would have failed much much quicker...

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EvilNCarnate

dmxtothemax

Probably just a low quality chinese product !
Its a common problem now days !
try to find a better quality product !
You may have to pay a bit more for it thou !

Avoid chinese made if poss'