Eh, they do age but a spare capacitor sitting in a likely climate controlled building and not being used isn’t going to age nearly as quickly as the one in use likely in the outdoors. Will it be as good as a brand new one? No. But it will be damn near as good and it will be on hand when you need it.
At the same time though, if a motor kills start components often enough that you need to keep a spare on hand then there is something wrong with that motor or your power source.
Yeah, I bought one to make sure that was the only problem. It just came back up so, now I’ll pull the furnace apart and find what size it uses for the blower keep them both on hand.
Then it certainly shouldn’t have failed yet so either high cycle rate or high draw.
Clean both coils and keep watch on how often it runs and how long it stays running for a couple weeks. Also if you still have a analog bimetallic thermostat those can fail and cause rapid cycling and if the compressor isn’t smart enough to delay they can cycle themselves to death.
At last it’s an inexpensive and easy fix. Just buy another capacitor with the same specs and swap them out. Better yet, buy two! Keep one as a backup.
Don’t buy an electrolytic capacitor as back up and store then over a long time. They will degrade and will be bad when you finally need them.
MKP/MKT capacitors are an exception since they don’t degrade the same.
Eh, they do age but a spare capacitor sitting in a likely climate controlled building and not being used isn’t going to age nearly as quickly as the one in use likely in the outdoors. Will it be as good as a brand new one? No. But it will be damn near as good and it will be on hand when you need it.
At the same time though, if a motor kills start components often enough that you need to keep a spare on hand then there is something wrong with that motor or your power source.
Yeah, I bought one to make sure that was the only problem. It just came back up so, now I’ll pull the furnace apart and find what size it uses for the blower keep them both on hand.
They can blow on their own but chances are you have a junk contactor or a fan that draws too much amperage.
3 year old unit :(
Then it certainly shouldn’t have failed yet so either high cycle rate or high draw.
Clean both coils and keep watch on how often it runs and how long it stays running for a couple weeks. Also if you still have a analog bimetallic thermostat those can fail and cause rapid cycling and if the compressor isn’t smart enough to delay they can cycle themselves to death.
It’s on an ecobee which appears to be behaving, pulling data from homeassistant on emporia power, it seems to be pretty chill.
she’s 1.5 ton pulling 1300 watts while running which actually seems low to me.
If there are other start components then those should also be swapped. One component failing can weaken the others, especially the start relay.