View Single Post
Old 05-07-17, 07:44 PM   #4
jeff5may
Supreme EcoRenovator
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: elizabethtown, ky, USA
Posts: 2,428
Thanks: 431
Thanked 619 Times in 517 Posts
Send a message via Yahoo to jeff5may
Default

OK, I did a little googling today. Your unit is electronicallly controlled, and has separate freezer and refrigerator compartments. Each compartment has its own evaporator. These units are notorious for losing their refrigerant, burning up compressors, and self-destructing control boards. So if you manage to fix it today, the unit may not live much longer before developing a different failure. Can't find squat for repair manuals on it. If you are lucky, there will be a mini-manual inside the unit somewhere.

Breathing new life into the control board is not a major pain for a competent electronics guy. These things are made just like a dehumidifier or wine cooler. Line power comes in and gets a main fuse for safety. The mains power is split off after the fuse. Full line voltage goes to relays and lights and such, a branch feeds a stepdown transformer or pulse transformer that powers the embedded controller. The secondary winding of the transformer feeds a rectifier or switchmode power supply that is regulated to produce a few different voltages. A lot of these boards have fuse resistors or pico-fuses in them, and if you don't know what to look for, they camouflage well.

Usually these boards have very few redundant components. Pretty much everything that is included serves a purpose, so jumping out parts to try to make the thing work is hopeless. Something downstream usually ends up getting roasted. You can check across the electrolytic caps for voltage: typically there is only 1 filter cap on each source. Look on the relays/contactors for the coil voltages and the main unregulated DC source will be close to this value. This unregulated source then feeds a regulator chip or circuit that then feeds the control buttons and micro.

If you really want to dig into the control board, please post some pics along with what you can see about interconnections. It would be way less painful to do a little troubleshooting, to see what happened to the board, and maybe fix it, than to pay almost the price of a new unit for another control board. You may end up frying another board in short order if the problem lies elsewhere. Ouch!
jeff5may is offline   Reply With Quote