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What is the cause for new swamp cooler's fan stopping after 15 seconds

Home Improvement Asked on November 30, 2020

I had a brand new Breezair LXH 170 installed last week. Four days later, it is failing. The fan starts, then about 15 seconds in, it stops. While I await service, does anyone have insight into what might cause such behavior?

I can’t now find it but I thought I previously read something about variable speed electric motors having something like a start mode and a run mode and that sometimes an issue arises where once it attempts to switch to normal running, it fails. Did I imagine that?

2 Answers

15 minutes sounds like a control system issue. Being that it's a swamp cooler, my initial guess would be that there is a problem with the water flow or return. The system will let the fan run without water flow for 15 minutes, but no longer.

Could also be heat related; your motor is overheating and tripping a protection device intended to keep it from catching on fire. it takes 15 minutes for the temperature to rise to that point. The proof of that would be if you IMMEDIATELY restart it after it shuts down, it runs for LESS than 15 minutes the second time, meaning it took less time to over heat because it was already hot. If it still shuts down in 15 minutes, it's a timer of some sort.

Answered by JRaef on November 30, 2020

The installer came back and it turned out there wasn't a great deal of leeway on the electrical connection and it was not hooked up quite right. After reconnecting, it's worked since!

I'm afraid I don't know the exact reason why a "weak" connection would've caused this exact behavior. Best guess is something like it was arcing just slightly and as the motor went to "run normally" mode, it ran on higher amps or during such a transition needed more amperage at that moment and cut out. It's a flimsy theory I assume electricians will laugh at.

Answered by John Spiegel on November 30, 2020

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