Then There's the Emergency Repair

Yesterday evening I was sitting on the couch in the living room, channel checking. All of a sudden, I noticed sweat dripping down my back. Not that that's unusual here, It is unusual in the living room as you're normally underneath or at least close by to a ceiling fan, which keeps a good amount of air circulating around you to prevent just such an occurrence.

I also noticed that it had become uncommonly hot. Wondering what had happened to cause all this meteorological change, I glanced around looking to see what could have caused the problem, and looking up, I observed the living room ceiling fan only running at about a quarter of the RPMs that it should have been. No wonder I was getting hot and developing a waterfall down my back.

Well, I knew right then what my morning project was going to be. It was a good thing I recently had ordered (and received) a goodly supply of ceiling fan capacitors. I was soon to find out if they were actually going to work.

I keep them handy down in  the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies, my workshop, in an old peanut butter jar. Just waiting for such an occasion as this.

New Ceiling Fan Capacitors

This will be the first time I've used one of these beauties. I hope they work. It's dang near impossible to find exactly the capacitors called for.

Here's the Cryptic Info

The ceiling fans call for a 5µF capacitor. The best I can find is 4.5µF. In case you're wondering the 'µF' means micro Farad, so named in honor of Michael Faraday.

Faraday, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was an English scientist whose main discoveries included those of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and electrolysis. It was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology. Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on his study wall.

It was shortly after breakfast this morning that I fetched the step ladder from the basement and climbed up to work on the fan. First thing was to remove the light package, a simple procedure involving removal of four screws.

Conveniently, the capacitor is one of the links between that and the main body of the fan motor. So it was easy to undo the wire nuts and remove the old capacitor. As young Nelson can attest, the old capacitor had reached the end of its lifespan and had failed in fairly dramatic fashion, blossoming several blisters on various parts of its body as it apparently overheated last evening.

Nelson Examining the Failed Capacitor

It was then a simple matter to hook up the new capacitor in its place, using the same wire nuts. You don't even have to worry about getting the wiring wrong with a two-wire capacitor. It makes no difference on the operation of the capacitor.

After that, I climbed down from the ladder and flipped the wall switch to turn the fan on. As you can see, it works perfectly once again. Then, it just becomes a matter of putting tools away and cleaning up.

A Successful Repair

That reminded me, I did have a couple other chores to do this morning before pool-time. First up, my workshop fan, which mounts on a wall of the shop, suddenly quit working some weeks ago. Since the ceiling fan repair went so speedily, I decided to tackle this. I dismantled the wall fan and wrote down the capacitor information for it. Hopefully, I can find a capacitor for it here in Corozal (always a crap-shoot).

Workshop Fan Awaiting Repair

My third morning project, I finally repaired our bamboo wind chime, which has been waiting about a year-and-a-half for repair (things have to age properly). I used stainless steel leader line and crimp fittings to redo the whole thing, getting rid of all the corded bits of the chime. It now is hanging back on the front porch.