I havd an air compressor that has the Subject line type of motor,
115vac. It only has about 200 hours on it. I had left it on for a
couple of days recently and found that my circuit breaker in my garage
was tripped. I restet it and the compressor started(surprised me
because I didn't remember leaving it on.). It ran about 2 seconds and
the circuit breaker kicked, again.
Before I tore into the compressor, I made sure it wasn't the circuit
breaker by plugging into the utility room circuit, 23 seconds later, it
kicked that breaker.
The strange thing is that it sounds different than before. It did have
a deeper, stronger sound when the motor was running, now it sounds
kinda puny. When the motor starts and runs, it turns the compressor
pump an actually builds a small amount of pressure before it kicks off.
I have pulled the starting cap and the run cap to get the numbers off,
and have found them online. However, before I buy them, I was wondering
if this sounds more like the main winding (not the startup winding) may
be burned out. I haven't opened the case on the motor to look, yet, but
I wouldn't think that the winding would NORMALLY short (thus more
current), but sometime during the few days that I had left the
compressor on, we had a lightning hit that destoyed a dvd player and an
audio amp.
It could be coincidence.
Anyway, what would cause the motor to pull excess current. Would the
run cap being bad cause this?
I have checked both caps with a DMM, and all I can say is that they are
not shorted.